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I believe in all that has never yet been spoken.
I want to free what waits within me
so that what no one has dared to wish for
may for once spring clear
without my contriving.
(Rainer Maria Rilke)
In our polyphonic performances, we are trying to activate all of our senses simultaneously, without contriving the process. The ultimate goal is the immersive experience where we “disappear.” We begin to perceive only on a subconscious level, in synergy: the music compliments poetry, scents interact with paintings and relevant pieces of films, and, eventually, we climb that imaginary staircase, towards the encounter with the genius.
Upcoming
Event
They say history is written by the strong and the victorious. But in a love story, neither strength nor victory really decides anything. There are those who are remembered, and those who are forgotten. When we listen to Tchaikovsky, it seems we know everything about him: his tenderness, his longing, his confession. Yet beside every great life there is often another one, quieter, that is rarely spoken of.
This concert is about her. About Antonina Milyukova, Tchaikovsky’s wife, a woman who for more than a century has been described in other people’s words. Together we will try to hear her own voice, in her letters, in his letters, and in the music written before and after they met.
The program will include The Seasons and the Grand Sonata in G major, Op. 37, together with Kirill Serebrennikov’s film Tchaikovsky’s Wife, a painfully intimate story told through her eyes.
Antonina fell in love with Tchaikovsky when he was still a little known teacher at the Moscow Conservatory. For four years she kept her feelings to herself, while he was writing The Seasons. In the spring of 1877 she finally found the courage to write to him about her love. He was reluctant at first, but then suddenly agreed to her proposal, though he told her honestly that he could offer her only “the quiet love of a brother.” He needed a marriage that would hide from the world his true attachments and his attraction to his own sex. And she needed him. Perhaps, in her innocence and with the upbringing she had, she could not even imagine that such a thing existed.
The marriage lasted only a few weeks. Tchaikovsky left for abroad, and Antonina remained alone, branded as the woman who misunderstood and nearly ruined a genius. In the spring of 1878, still recovering from what had happened, Tchaikovsky wrote the Grand Sonata, perhaps his own musical account of those events, a sonata he later came to dislike. But for her, long years of poverty, humiliation, and silence were only beginning. Did she ever truly understand the real reasons, his secret? Or not? It is complicated, and we will try to find out together during the concert. What we do know is that she never used anything against him, and to the end she protected his name. She spent nearly twenty years in a psychiatric hospital and died in February 1917, almost forgotten.
For many years, like so many others, I believed the story we were given: a simple, clinging woman who could not understand her husband’s genius. That version came from Tchaikovsky’s brothers, and Soviet biographers willingly repeated it. It was a convenient story. Only for Antonina it left nothing, not even the right to her own pain.
Yet reading her letters, I find no bitterness and no wish for revenge. I find a love that could not turn into anything else. And reading his letters, I see not a villain, but a man trying to save himself from himself, and not knowing how to do it without wounding another.
Perhaps there is no one here to judge. He could not love her the way she hoped. She could not stop loving him. His brothers protected him as well as they knew how. Each of them was right in their own truth, and each was alone in it. If there is an injustice, it is not in anyone’s ill will, but in how history so often remembers the voice of the strong and forgets the voice of the one who loved.
Antonina herself said it best: “What right do I have to judge you? God will judge us…”
Perhaps music is that place where everyone is heard. In music no one is guilty. There is only what truly was: hope, tenderness, despair, and forgiveness.
Future project
“The Price of Belonging: Assimilated, But Never Accepted”
Fanny Mendelssohn, Felix Mendelssohn, Alfred Schnittke, Robert Schumann, Frédéric Chopin.
Felix and Fanny Mendelssohn were baptized, changed their name, and dedicated their lives to German music. Alfred Schnittke was German and Jewish at once, raised in Soviet Russia, and died a Catholic. Robert and Clara Schumann adored Mendelssohn; Robert once called him a true God of music, yet their private diaries are purely antisemitic. Tonight we consider that contradiction and ask what it says about us.
We finish with Chopin, who never tried to belong anywhere. He left Poland at twenty and never went back, his heart returned to Warsaw after death while the rest of him stayed in French soil. But even so, he was searching for his belonging. It’s well known that he was rather antisemitic, expressing casual contempt for Jewish colleagues in his letters, even though he counted Jewish musicians among his closest friends.
Yet his music emanates different vibrations—divine, untouched by any of this. So… does it matter, in the end, if we know? And what is the price of belonging?
Reflection of the last season
Dear Friends of Resonance Salon,
I congratulate us all on the completion of our fourth season. I wish you a summer of gentle, undemanding beauty: sunsets, sunrises, the bearable lightness of being, and music that asks absolutely nothing of you whatsoever. We all need rest from being too serious about life.
For those of you who feel that five concerts on madness, cruelty, and the dissolution of the self was not quite enough, I have written something below for us to contemplate together.
For the rest, thank you deeply and sincerely for spending four seasons with us. For your curiosity, your patience, and for simply being alive and choosing to spend some of that aliveness with us.
Our audience is growing both inwards and outwards. Nearly every concert this season was fully sold out, which is perhaps a sign that people are hungry for something beyond the traditional concert format. Not that there is anything wrong with the traditional format. I still love it dearly. I just also love it when there are no artificial boundaries and, in a single evening, we can meet people we would never expect to find in the same room: Piaf and Bergman, Wolf and his own reincarnation on stage…
Have a great and joyful summer.
Artistically yours,
Leon
The Season Reflection
If you look at our entire season as one long novel, you get the feeling that at first all of this looked like a cultural game played by elite people with good taste and ended up as almost a collective session of existential therapy :))
And what makes it especially suspicious is that everything began absolutely innocently. So what: Boundless B! Bach, Beethoven, Brahms. Bergman, Bruegel, Bresson. European salon spirit. Beautiful people, beautiful conversations, beautiful wine.
And then suddenly it turns out that through Bergman's extraordinary film Saraband, the heroine is finally trying to sort things out with her father and cello teacher after her mother's death, and our cellist Sergey Antonov unexpectedly, for all of us, goes through absolutely the same story 😱😱😱 and starts talking about his own mother after his father's death, and the audience is no longer entirely sure: did they come to a chamber music evening or did they accidentally stumble into an exhibitionistic form of confession? And thank you Sergey for those minutes. Because that was the exact moment when music first stopped being just repertoire and became a door, or a cover, for human vulnerability…
Then came the Theatre of Cruelty. And here you wanted precisely an electric shock. Antonin Artaud, Bartók, Balinese theater dances, nerve, the feeling that art must not calm a person but wake them up, preferably at three in the morning of one's inner existence. That was a concert especially resonant, I think, for people who have at least kept their souls young. Where you are not afraid that modernity is flaying the skin off a person and then Bach carefully tries to put the nervous system back together.
Then there was Progress in Art, and this was perhaps the most conciliatory project of the season. Because the very idea of discussing "progress in art" today sounds almost absurd. After all, progress is supposedly happening almost automatically: phones get thinner, algorithms get smarter, people sleep worse, etc. But through the Black Square, through Arnold Schoenberg and through Johannes Brahms, there suddenly emerged an almost unanimous conclusion: it seems there is no progress in art whatsoever 😱😱😱. At any rate, our salon audience didn't seem to find much enthusiasm for the opposing view. Yes, technique develops, but the human soul has possibly been going in circles for several thousand years already.
And then Sincerity in Art / Art of Sincerity happened. And this concert, to my astonishment, provoked the most arguments and bewilderment. Because the moment the question arises, “but what actually is sincerity?”, the ground starts to slip from under your feet. Interestingly, it was precisely the "sincere" concert that turned out to be almost painful for me personally. Serves me right. You shouldn't go poking into people's souls with a flashlight and philosophical categories. Because what had seemed absolutely obvious, this here is sincere 🙏 and that there is fake 😂, suddenly stopped being obvious at all. It seems this is an unpleasant but apparently necessary discovery: sincerity cannot be verified. It has no certificate of authenticity. Sometimes a mask is more honest than a confession. And sometimes a person plays their role so sincerely that they no longer know themselves where the performance ends and life begins.
And finally the last concert. Where Do We Go When We Go Mad? Here, I think, we moved furthest away from music toward something already almost metaphysical. Through Schumann, Wolf, Ingmar Bergman, and of course Piaf, the theme became not intellectual, not psychological, but almost lived: how do we cope with difficulty, taking genius as our example? It suddenly became existential rather than psychiatric. And it was no longer about "mad geniuses." It was about something far stranger: can art and love lead us toward our true "self"? Or on the contrary, toward liberation from this endless, exhausting "self"?
And here arises, perhaps, the central paradox of the season. All the programs were what you might call "intellectual" and thank you to the audience for your patience 🙏🙏 : philosophy, cinema, literature, art history, poetry, and so on. References upon references; after all, ours is an elite salon and we assume people already know a ton of things. But the result turned out to be almost anti- or supra-intellectual. Because it seems our season led not to clarity but to mystery. Not to answers but to a condition: not to explain a person definitively, but to make their existence a little more bearable and at the same time a little more beautiful. ❤️💃🏿
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Program Changes and Cancellations
Programs and artists are subject to change. If an event presented by NY Resonance is cancelled or postponed, we will announce the change—if time permits—by email, phone, a letter sent to your home, and on www.nyresonance.com.
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