EILEEN BATTERSBYponders Napoleon and Tchaikovsky
ALTHOUGH HIS ULTIMATE defeat was to occur at Waterloo, the end of Napoleon’s dazzling career had begun three years earlier, in 1812, when he lead his Grande Armé into Russia. The self-made Emperor of the French was outwitted by an emperor born into the role, Tsar Alexander I, who was shrewdly aware that the Russians did not have to lift arms; the brutal Russian winter would dictate events. Napoleon’s Russian campaign remains one of the great stories of military history, not least because of its eerie parallels with the equally ill-advised invasion of Russia launched 129 years later by Hitler in June 1941. Operation Barbarossa began with the element of surprise yet it too fell apart. All very strange considering that Tolstoy had in War and Peace graphically immortalised the disasters encountered by Napoleon. Just as his starving troops died in the snow in Russia’s vast, empty landscape, so too would Hitler’s. More than anything Napoleon had coveted Moscow, which he considered to be the definitive political statement. Yet he was to ride into a deserted city in which an assortment of released convicts and lunatics waited, ordered to set fire to it. In time Napoleon would concede that he should have left Moscow within days of entering it. But he didn’t. The Russian winter crept up on retreating soldiers so hungry that they were prepared to kill each other over the raw flesh of dead horses.
Philippe-Paul de Ségur was born into an aristocratic family impoverished by the French Revolution. In 1800 he entered the cavalry and was quickly assigned to Napoleon’s personal staff. He would accompany his emperor until the final act, Waterloo.
In 1824 de Ségur published his dramatic, two-volume, eye-witness account of Napoleon’s Russian campaign. Such was the fury at de Ségur’s narrative, he was challenged to a duel. But he survived, living on to 93.
Old age did not favour the Russian composer Pyotr Illich Tchaikovsky, who suffered not only the constraints of official Russian musical life, but also lived in fear of allegations of homosexuality at a time in which in Russia such orientation meant the death penalty.
Despite his complaints and compulsive travelling abroad, Tchaikovsky loved Russia. For many he is the consummate Russian composer; his music is richly lyrical and romantic, his ballet scores sublime and his sixth symphony, the Pathétique in B minor (1893), is melancholic and profound, appearing as it did in the year of his death apparently from cholera, although it is suggested he committed suicide to avoid a sexual scandal. Personally tormented though he was, Tchaikovsky responded magnificently, when commissioned in 1880 to commemorate the great Russian victory over Napoleon at Borodino. His rousingly patriotic Festival Overture: The Year 1812 , premiered in 1882, begins with a hymn as Russia prays for deliverance. It grows thrillingly in volume to include canons and victory bells. Many a marathon runner has described it as inspirational. As the London Olympics approach, the 1812 overture will be competing with The Chariots of Fire theme.