“In the Feverish Rapture of Sound”

About the event

Pyotr Tchaikovsky and his patroness Nadezhda von Meck wrote more than 1,200 letters to each other. The correspondence lasted 14 years and comprises almost 2,000 pages. Yet the two pen friends never spoke to one another and saw each other only a few times from a distance. Nevertheless their correspondence reflects one of the most unusual love stories of the 19th century: a relationship at a distance that does without physical closeness, yet develops an ecstatic spiritual intensity that breaks all conventions.

The author Silvia Adler created a stage version from the extensive correspondence and, together with the Russian Ksenia Fischer, newly translated the selected letters. The play offers captivating insights into Tchaikovsky's musical work and the composer's hidden emotional world.

The agreement never to meet in person was the unshakeable basis of their friendship. The relationship between the homosexual Tchaikovsky and his patroness – the mother of 18 children – resembled a platonic “amour fou” that, even though it existed only on paper, can hardly be surpassed in intimacy, madness and tragedy. Why Nadezhda von Meck abruptly broke off the correspondence after 14 years remains a mystery to this day.

To mark the 125th anniversary of Pyotr Tchaikovsky's death, the correspondence is staged by the Chopin Society at the Orangerie on 3 November 2018.

The Viennese actress Sona MacDonald, awarded Austria's most important theatre prize, the Nestroy Prize, in 2016, and the actor Christian Nickel, who achieved his international breakthrough as Faust in Peter Stein's legendary Expo 2000 production in Hanover, Berlin and Vienna, appear as Nadezhda von Meck and Pyotr Tchaikovsky. The pianist Boris Bloch performs famous masterpieces by the composer, who died on 6 November 1893.

Biographies