Tchaikovsky's music was almost as popular in his lifetime as it became after his death, and he enjoyed not only European fame but was feted in America when he visited there. In certain respects he was a throwback to the old style professional musician, in a Romantic age which demanded all the public trappings of genius, even an element of hokum. The inner tragedy of his life - only recently admitted in full - was his homosexuality, which made him edgy, neurotic and sometimes paranoid he fled from it into a disastrous marriage, and it seems that his relations with a young Russian nobleman led to a kind of court martial by his old schoolfellows, who more or less ordered him to commit suicide to avoid a public scandal. (There seems little doubt, nowadays, that he died by poison rather than from cholera, as was officially stated.) The strange story of his 14 year patronage by Nadezhda von Meck, whom he never met, is well told.