# Tchaikovsky’s Suicide Note?



## EdwardBast (Nov 25, 2013)

EdwardBast said:


> I was hoping I wouldn't have to do this yet again, but since this rotting nonsense refuses to die and crawls out of its grave every six months, I will. And I'll blog it this time so that I won't have to look it up again.
> 
> The earliest identified written source of the Tchaikovsky suicide rumor is in the as yet unpublished memoirs of one R.A. Mooser, a Swiss writer on music who arrived in St. Petersburg in 1896, well after the composer's death. He was never accepted in the musical circles of the city and Alexander Poznansky, Tchaikovsky's biographer, suggests that this outsider status motivated him to pose as someone with juicy inside knowledge. He claims to have first heard the rumor from an unidentified critic at the _St. Petersburg Zeitung_. Later he claims to have heard it again from Riccardo Drigo, the ballet conductor at the Mariinsky Theater, and Alexander Glazunov. Since neither of these people could possibly have had any first hand knowledge of the alleged suicide, Mooser's report - even if his highly unlikely claims about Drigo and Glazunov are true - is at best third hand gossip written by a nonentity. Please let this ridiculous story DIE!


----------

