Voyeurs. Stalkers. Biography readers.

I do not know which hand Tchaikovsky favored for the act of self-gratification.  I doubt anyone knows.  Still, it is conceivable (if by now very unlikely) that evidence concerning Tchaikovsky’s preference in that area may one day come to light.  Say, a fortuitously discovered letter from the composer’s brother Modest to one of Modest’s lovers in which it is mentioned that Tchaikovsky was a lefty.  Supposing this were to happen tomorrow, would you expect to read about Tchaikovsky’s left-handed masturbation in the composer’s updated biographies?

If you are inclined to answer ‘No’, you might have a rather quaint conception of the historico-biographical aims of musicology.  You probably think that musicology is concerned with historico-biographical facts (or conjectures supported by less than conclusive evidence) which are non-trivially relevant to the composer’s music.  Of course, separating what is musically relevant from what isn’t may not always be easy, but then that’s just the kind of work musicologists ought to do – and be good at – to earn their keep.

Alas, the constraint of relevance, if scrupulously observed, would limit biographies to slender monographs rather than thick tomes favored by university presses and non-academic publishers alike.  The imposing size of these often multi-volume affairs is not at all surprising.  From the list of dishes Bach once had for dinner to the layout of Elliott Carter’s Manhattan apartment, from Wagner’s obsession with silk to Tchaikovsky’s sexual encounters with manservants, bathhouse attendants, and male prostitutes, composers’ biographies are packed with countless factoids which contribute absolutely nothing to our understanding, appreciation, or enjoyment of the composer’s works.  And when factoids seem not enough, there are gratuitous speculations, such as that Tchaikovsky contracted cholera through contact with fecal matter during unsafe homosexual sex.  If this is  legitimate biographical ‘material’, surely musicology would welcome the news of Tchakovsky being a left-handed masturbator.  Welcome and put it to work right away.  Having already mastered the art of empirically meaningless musical ‘analysis’ – the kind which identifies “the throttling rage of a rapist” in Beethoven’s Ninth or “the fluid sexuality” in Schubert’s Unfinished – musicologists would waste no time uncovering musical evidence of left-handed masturbation in Swan Lake or the Pathetique Symphony.

The point of all this is not, of course, that musicology feels no shame peddling musically irrelevant biographical junk along with free associations which are certifiably loony when they are not painfully trivial.  Art history and literary studies are no better in this respect.  Rather it is the question of why we read the stuff.  What is it that we get from being made to feel like time-traveling disembodied spirits who survey the food on Bach’s dinner table or examine the dirty, smelly room of a Parisian male prostitute with whom Tchaikovsky “became delirious from amorous happiness and experienced incredible pleasure”?

Here is my answer.  Reading biographies, like reading tabloid magazines or taking drive-by tours of movie stars’ estates in Beverly Hills, is a socially acceptable form of voyeurism and stalking.  Its veneer of academic respectability (the author’s PhD, copious notes, long bibliography) and cultural sophistication (the subject is a great composer, artist, writer, scientist) is too thin to hide the fact that it caters to the same kind of obsessive curiosity about the private lives of celebrities.  Those who read about how much money Mozart made from his subscription concerts or how much Massenet spent on his villa in the south of France have no reason to feel superior to those who read about how much the Rolling Stones earned from their last American tour or how much John Travolta paid for his Boeing 737 jet.  Reading about Wagner’s adulterous affair with Cosima von Bülow does not make one more culturally refined or more erudite than reading about Brad Pitt’s adulterous affair with Angelina Jolie.  In all such comparisons the only difference is that celebrities of art music are long dead and their dirty laundry is aired in a vastly richer historical context created by the passage of time and shaped by the seemingly endless list of scholarly publications.

So go ahead, indulge your inner voyeur and stalker.  Read about F. Scott Fitzgerald's alcoholic tantrums, Tchaikovsky's homosexual yearnings, or Stravinsky's sucking up to Mussolini.  Have fun with Rossini’s urinary tract problems, Lucian Freud’s gambling addiction, or Hemingway’s gory suicide.  This hobby of yours is still quite innocent.  A century or two from now biographies will likely rely not on yellowed letters and crumbling diaries but on yottabytes of data recorded by security cameras, webcams, smartphones, and maybe even brain implants.  If, as we all know, a picture is worth a thousand words, an unwisely sent (or saved) high definition video is worth thousands of pictures.  You do the math.