Yesterday I went to hear the Tampa Bay Symphony play Tchaikovsky's 6th Symphony at the Straz Center in Tampa. My friend Ruth Kern plays the cello in this amazing, all-volunteer orchestra. It was the second time I heard the TBS play the piece. As I sat in the darkened theater, listening to this monumental work, I thought back to the first time I heard the TBS play Tchaikovsky's final piece of music at the Palladium in St. Petersburg.
It was on February 18, 2014, the day I learned that my childhood friend Tom Valeo was dying of cancer.
Tom and I had grown up together in Kenosha, Wisconsin. I adored his mother who, like me, was of Scandinavian descent. I was a bit in love with his Italian father who was a labor leader. He never laughed at my youthful opinions about the state of the world. Our families thought Tom and I might end up getting married, but it wasn't like that. He was like a brother to me. A brother without the baggage of sibling rivalry.
We both ended up working as journalists. He got married, had three kids, moved to Chicago (where he covered the theater scene for the Daily Herald), and got divorced. I got married, got divorced, became a travel writer, eventually moved to St. Petersburg to take up a more sedentary job as book editor of the St. Petersburg Times and remarried. We kept in touch no matter how far apart life took us.
Then suddenly, miraculously, he was living again in the same town as I was. I had introduced him to a friend and colleague of mine, Karen Pryslopski, and they had fallen in love. He moved to St. Petersburg and moved in with Karen.
When they finally got married, Tom asked me to be his best "man" at their wedding, which took place, appropriately, in their kitchen. They were both amazing cooks.
For years I would tell people that pairing up Tom and Karen was the greatest accomplishment of my life. I had never seen two people so happy together.
Recasting himself as a science writer, Tom first worked at their kitchen table and then in an office that Karen fixed up with posters of Chicago and a photo of Tom meditating under a Florida tree (used to illustrate a cover story he wrote on the benefits of mediation as we age). In addition to writing about science, he gave lectures on the art of writing and ran workshops encouraging people to begin their "existential memoirs." He saw writing as an act of meditation, a chance for deep self-reflection.
Karen was still working full-time at the newspaper, but both of were freelancers by then. We would meet in the afternoons over the cappuccinos that he would whip up with his amazing state-of-the-art machine to talk about our work and the state of the world.
Then in 2014 four days after Valentine's Day (a holiday none of us were very fond of), I got a call from Tom, asking me to stop by. He said that he had something important to tell me. Karen was at work. He was in the kitchen, as usual, making us cappuccinos. When I walked in, he dropped the bombshell: He didn’t have long to live.
He asked me not to tell Karen that there was no chance of recovery. When he had felt a pressure in his upper chest, the science writer in him knew immediately what a doctor confirmed: He had an advanced case of esophageal cancer. He was prepared for what was to come. Karen needed to keep hoping for a miracle, he told me. I promised him I would stay by her side with all the support I could muster.
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That night I went to the Palladium in St. Petersburg to hear Tchaikovsky's 6th with my friend Ruth at the cello. As the piece opened with its mournful bassoon solo, I began to cry and never stopped until the music ended. I gave myself over entirely to the symphony, letting it carry me through its themes of life and death. At the end of the fourth and final movement instead of the usual triumphant, Ta Da I was used to hearing at the end of symphonies, the music merely faded away. I walked out of the theater, knowing I would never forget that day or that music.
Tchaikovsky called his 6th Symphony the Pateticheskaya Symphony, using the Russian word which means passion or emotive. The French translated that word as "pathetique," which suggests something emotional, evoking pity. That moniker, which is how the piece is known today, seemed all-too-prophetic when Tchaikovsky died only nine days after he conducted its premiere in St. Petersburg (the other St. Petersburg of course) in 1893. Was the symphony a suicide note? Did Tchaikovsky know he was dying? Did he mean to evoke pity?
There has always been a great deal of mystery surrounding Tchaikovsky and his last symphony. Some have speculated that he was writing his own requiem because the truth of his sexual orientation was about to be made public. Others say that is nonsense. He contracted cholera after the premiere and couldn’t possibility have known that he was about to die when he was writing the work.
There are several facts that are undisputed. We do know that Tchaikovsky had tried to commit suicide in the past--after his marriage to Antonina Miliukova, a former student, spectacularly fell apart. We do know that he was gay. But there is evidence that he was comfortable with his sexuality (his orientation was an open secret among musicians and those close to him) and that 19th century Russia was not as intolerant of homosexuality as present-day Russia is.
"Biographer Alexander Poznansky, the first scholar to access Tchaikovsky's extensive letters--previously suppressed by Soviet authorities--convincingly argues against the suicide theory," says my cellist friend Ruth in the program notes she wrote for TSO's most recent performance of Tchaikovsky's 6th.
We’ll never know, of course, what Tchaikovsky really was thinking when he composed the Pathétique, but I do know that night in 2014 when I first heard the Tampa Bay Symphony play it, his music transcended biography. His notes rattled my heart.
. . .
I had many months to say goodbye to Tom before he died on Earth Day in 2015. We had several more dinners together, many more days of laughter and I was able, repeatedly, to tell him how much he had meant to me in my life, how much I was going to miss him.
That was a conversation I was never able to have with Karen. She unexpectedly died just under six years after Tom's death. It was early 2021. From a fall perhaps. We don’t know. When she didn’t answer our calls, friends went to check up on her. They found her unconscious in her bed. She never woke up. We had braved that first year of the pandemic together, only to have one of us die of something that had nothing to do with COVID.
I had kept my promise though. I had stood by her as best as I could. We marked every Earth Day with a dinner al fresco on Beach Drive. We audited classes together at USFSP and tried out new restaurants. She cooked for me. I brought her wine. A mutual friend who plays violin with the Florida Orchestra got us tickets to dozens of concerts.
Karen had never been to a symphony orchestra. "What should I wear?" she asked, the first time we went. "It's Florida," I told her, "Anything goes, but shorts." At every concert after that, she delighted in pointing out to me someone who had come in shorts. She always insisted on sitting as high up as possible so we could see the entire orchestra. She called the first violinist her “boyfriend.” She had never seen a musician so animated.
Last fall when a friend invited me to go hear a Florida Orchestra performance at Mahaffey Theater, I was delighted that his tickets were in the mezzanine, Karen's favorite spot. I found myself looking around for a guy in shorts. I laughed when I so easily spotted someone. Tchaikovsky was on the program. Not his 6th but his 4th.
Tchaikovsky's 6th, of course, will always remind me of Tom–and you might imagine that now the Pathétique, linked to the composer’s sudden and mysterious death, would also make me think of Karen.
. . .
But it is Tchaikovsky’s 4th that I associate most with her. Tchaikovsky wrote his 4th symphony after that failed suicide attempt when he was trying to be happy once again. Its bittersweetness and triumphant finale addresses perfectly the time I had together with Karen after Tom's death, when both of us were trying to cope with sadness.
Describing his achingly beautiful second movement, which opens with the melancholy sounds of an oboe solo, Tchaikovsky wrote: “Life has you tired out. Many things flit through the memory… there were happy moments when young blood pulsed warm and life was gratifying. There were also moments of grief and of irreparable loss. It is all-remote in the past. It is both sad and somehow sweet to lose oneself in the past. And yet, we are weary of existence.”
But it is Tchaikovsky's comments about the last movement of the 4th, with its joyous sound of cymbals, that made me realize why I will forever link Karen to this work of art. His words underscore how important it is to turn to others when you are grieving a loss:
“If you cannot discover the reasons for happiness in yourself, look at others. Upbraid yourself and do not say that the entire world is sad…
“Take happiness from the joys of others. Life is bearable after all."
Hearing Tchaikovsky's 6th symphony again this week, I found myself once again grateful for the healing power of music. I was struck by the thought that Tchaikovsky's symphonies are in a way the musical equivalent of Tom's existential memoirs, deep dives into the composer's angsts as well as his triumphs. The fact that an artist shares with us his or her personal reflections--whether they take the form of music, writing or any other art-- is our gain. Through that sharing, we are encouraged to reflect on our own personal joys and losses. What else is the point of art?
Tchaikovsky once said, “Truly there would be reason to go mad were it not for music.” Listening to his final symphony this week, to that I would add, truly there would be reason to go mad were it not for the music of friendship.
A version of this essay was posted last year in Arts Coast Magazine, prompted by a question the editor of that online magazine posed to those of us who are regular contributors. Sheila Cowley asked us, "Is there something in a work of art, some detail you noticed, that made that work special for you?" At first, nothing came to mind. Then, all of a sudden, I thought of Tchaikovsky and how his two very personal symphonies had become very personal for me.
