Death of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky - Theories - Suicide Ordered By "court of Honor"

Suicide Ordered By "court of Honor"

Another theory was first broached publicly by Russian musicologist Alexandra Orlova in 1979 when she emigrated to the West. The key witness for Orlova's account was Alexander Voitrov, a pupil at the School of Jurisprudence before World War I who had reportedly amassed much about the history and people of his alma mater. Among these people was Nikolay Borisovich Jacobi, Senior Procurator to the Senate in the 1890s. Jacobi's widow, Elozabeta Karlovna, reportedly told Voitrov in 1913 that a Duke Stenbok-Fermor was disturbed by the attention which Tchaikovsky was paying to his young nephew. Stenbok-Fernor wrote a letter of accusation to the Tsar in the autumn of 1893 and gave the letter to Jacobi to deliver. Jacobi wanted to avoid a public scandal. He therefore invited all of Tchaikovsky's former schoolmates that he could locate in St. Petersburg—eight people altogether—to serve in a "court of honor" to discuss the charge. This meeting, held in Jacoby's study, lasted almost five hours. At the end of that time, Tchaikovsky rushed out, pale and agitated, without saying a word. Once everyone else had left, Jacobi told his wife that they had decided that Tchaikovsky should kill himself. Within a day or two of this meeting, news of the composer's illness was circulating in St. Petersburg.

Orlova suggests this court of honor could have been convened on 31 October. This is the only day during which nothing is known about Tchaikovsky's activities until evening. Brown suggests that perhaps it is significant that Modest records his brother's last days from that evening, when Tchaikovsky attended Rubinstein's opera Die Makkabäer.

In November 1993 the BBC aired a documentary entitled Pride or Prejudice, which investigated various theories regarding Tchaikovsky's death. Among those interviewed were Orlova, Brown and Poznansky, along with various experts on Russian history. Dr John Henry of Guy's Hospital, an expert witness working in the British National Poison Unit at the time, concluded in the documentary that all the reported symptoms of Tchaikovsky's illness "fit very closely with arsenic poisoning." He suggested that people would have known that acute diarrhoea, dehydration and kidney failure resembled the manifestations of cholera. This would help bolster a potential illusion of the death as a case of cholera. The conclusion reached in the documentary leaned largely in favor of the "court of honor" theory.

Other well-respected studies of the composer have challenged Orlova's claims in detail, and concluded that the composer's death was due to natural causes. Among other challenges to Orlova's thesis, Poznansky revealed that there was no Duke Stenbock-Fermor, but there was a Count of that name. However, he was an equerry to Tsar Alexander III, and would not have needed an intermediary to deliver a letter to his own employer. As for the supposed threat to the reputation of the St Petersburg School of Jurisprudence represented by Tchaikovsky's homosexual affairs, Poznansky depicts the school as a hotbed of all-male debauchery which even had its own song hymning the delights of homosexuality.