Ever since I started reading and listening to Camille Paglia, I became fascinated by the idea that many families, even deeply traditional ones, are emotionally organized around women. The power they exercise — what Paglia calls Chthonic — is almost intangible, invisible, difficult to formalize, yet omnipresent and unquestionable inside the household itself. Certain strands of modern feminism sometimes struggle to grasp this kind of influence because it does not always manifest through explicit authority, public status, or direct confrontation.…

What impressed me most about this BBC dramatized documentary on Tchaikovsky is that it avoids reducing him to either a “tormented homosexual genius” cliché or a sanitized monument of classical music. Instead, it treats his tragic private life as something inseparable from the emotional force of his work.

The dramatized segments are also surprisingly good, perfectly capturing that foggy, bohemian 19th-century Romantic atmosphere; and they are organically interwoven with orchestral passages from Tchaikovsky’s work in a way that gives the…