The most well-known Russian composer of all time is Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, whose full name has been anglicized as Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky. He was born in Votkinsk, Russia, on April 25 (May 7, New Style), 1840, and passed away in St. Petersburg on October 25 (November 6, 1893). Due to its catchy, kindhearted melodies, excellent harmonies, and vibrant, scenic orchestration, which together elicit a strong emotional reaction, his music has always had a lot of popular appeals. Seven symphonies, eleven operas, three ballets, five suites, three piano concertos, one violin concerto, eleven overtures — more precisely, three overtures and eight single-movement programmatic orchestral works, four cantatas, twenty choral works, three string quartets, a string sextet, and more than one hundred songs and piano pieces — are all included in his body of work.
Tchaikovsky was one of the six living children of French émigré Alexandra Assier and Ilya Tchaikovsky, manager of the Kamsko-Votkinsk metal factory. From an early age, he showed a marked interest in music, and the family’s orchestrina was the source of his first musical impressions. At the age of four, he co-wrote a song with his sister Alexandra that was his first attempt at composing that was ever recorded. He started taking piano lessons from a local instructor in 1845 when he learned about Friedrich Kalkbrenner’s piano compositions and the mazurkas of Frédéric Chopin. Tchaikovsky’s parents had no idea that their son may become a musician because music education was not offered in Russian schools at the time. Instead, they decided to train the sensitive and high-strung youngster for a job in the government. Tchaikovsky spent nine years as a boarder at the elite Imperial School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg, where he enrolled in 1850. He was shown to be a conscientious and excellent student who was well-liked by his class. At the same time, Tchaikovsky developed close emotional bonds with some of his classmates in this all-male atmosphere.
His mother had cholera and passed away in 1854. Tchaikovsky’s father finally saw his son’s calling during the boy’s last years at school and recruited the experienced piano instructor Rudolph Kündinger to train him. The first person to recognize Tchaikovsky’s musical abilities was the Italian singing teacher Luigi Piccioli, who influenced him when he was 17 years old. As a result, Tchaikovsky acquired a fascination for Italian music that lasted his whole life. Don Giovanni by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart turned out to be another epiphany that profoundly influenced his musical taste. He made his first trips outside of Russia in the summer of 1861, visiting Germany, France, and England. In October of the same year, he started taking music lessons at the newly established Russian Musical Society. Tchaikovsky was one of the school’s initial enrollees when it initially opened the following fall at St. Petersburg Conservatory. He quit his position as a clerk at the Ministry of Justice after deciding to devote his life to music.
At the St. Petersburg Conservatory, Tchaikovsky studied composition and instrumentation with Anton Rubinstein and harmony and counterpoint with Nikolay Zaremba for over three years. A mature attempt at dramatic program music, The Storm, an overture by the composer from 1864, was one of his early orchestral compositions. In August 1865, Johann Strauss the Younger conducted Tchaikovsky’s Characteristic Dances in a concert in Pavlovsk, close to St. Petersburg, marking the first public performance of any of his compositions. Tchaikovsky traveled to Moscow after earning his degree in December 1865 to teach music theory at the Russian Musical Society, which was later renamed the Moscow Conservatory. Although he found teaching challenging, his connection with the director Nikolay Rubinstein — who had initially extended the offer — made it more tolerable. Tchaikovsky completed his first symphony, Symphony №1 in G Minor (written in 1866; Winter Daydreams), and his first opera, The Voyevoda, in less than five years (1868). Tchaikovsky briefly considered getting married to Belgian mezzo-soprano Désirée Artôt after meeting her in 1868, but their engagement didn’t work out. Even The Five, a significant group of patriotic Russian composers who never understood the cosmopolitanism of Tchaikovsky’s music, gave the opera The Voyevoda favorable reviews. Tchaikovsky finished his Romeo and Juliet overture in 1869, gently modifying sonata form to reflect the dramatic organization of Shakespeare’s play. The next year, Nikolay Rubinstein led a successful performance of this piece, and it finally became the first of Tchaikovsky’s works to become a part of the accepted worldwide classical repertoire.
String Quartet №1 was successfully performed for the public in Moscow’s Hall of Nobility in March 1871, and Tchaikovsky completed another opera, The Oprichnik, in April 1872. He started writing his Symphony №2 in C Minor, subsequently known as The Little Russian, while spending the summer at his sister’s farm in Ukraine. He finished it the same year. In April 1874, the Maryinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg hosted the premiere of The Oprichnik. Despite its early popularity, the opera failed to win over the critics; Tchaikovsky gradually came around to their point of view. Similar evaluations were made of his subsequent opera, Vakula the Smith (1874), which was eventually altered into Cherevichki (1885; The Little Shoes). In his early operas, the young composer struggled to strike a balance between his creative zeal and his capacity for critical evaluation of the work in progress. However, Tchaikovsky’s musical compositions started to gain him recognition, and towards the close of 1874, he created his Piano Concerto №1 in B-flat Minor, a piece that would go on to become famous despite Rubinstein’s initial rejection. In Boston, Massachusetts, in October 1875, Hans von Bülow gave the concerto’s triumphant world debut. Tchaikovsky wrote Symphony №3 in D Major during the summer of 1875, and it was almost immediately well-received in Russia.
Tchaikovsky left Russia at the very end of 1875 to go around Europe. A performance of Georges Bizet’s Carmen at the Opéra-Comique in Paris left a lasting impression on him, but the Ring cycle by Richard Wagner, which he saw at Bayreuth, Germany, during the summer of 1876, left him unimpressed. He completed his symphonic fantasia Francesca da Rimini, a piece he was most proud of, in November 1876. Tchaikovsky had finished writing Swan Lake, the first of his renowned ballet trilogy, earlier that year. The ballet was first performed on February 20, 1877, but due to poor staging and choreography, it was not well received and was quickly removed from the repertoire. Tchaikovsky’s music was becoming increasingly well-liked both inside and outside of Russia, which eventually sparked curiosity in him and his personal life. Although homosexuality was against the law in Russia, the upper classes were allowed to practice it. Tchaikovsky made the hasty decision to wed Antonina Milyukova, a young and innocent music student who had professed her love for him, in the summer of 1877 due to social and familial pressures, as well as his discomfort with the fact that his younger brother Modest was displaying the same sexual tendencies. The couple’s marriage failed as a result of Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality and their virtually total incompatibility; he left for another country within weeks and never returned to live with his bride. Tchaikovsky was compelled by this experience to accept that he could not become respectable by following societal norms and that he could not change his sexual orientation. “Only now, especially after the account of my marriage, have I truly begun to comprehend that there is nothing more pointless than not desiring to be that which I am by nature,” he said in a letter to his brother Anatoly from Florence on February 13, 1878.
The unusual friendship between Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meck, the wealthy railroad magnate’s widow, began in 1876 and would play a significant role in their lives for the following 14 years. She became his patroness since she was a huge fan of his art and finally set up a regular monthly payment for him. This allowed him to leave the conservatory in 1878 and concentrate on producing music. He could then afford to spend the next winters in Europe and travel back to Russia every summer. Despite their mutual agreement that they would never meet, he and his benefactor exchanged a ton of letters that together provide a fascinating literary and historical record. They candidly discussed a wide range of themes during the conversation, starting with politics or ideologies and moving on to subjects like the psychology of creativity, religious belief, and the nature of love. Tchaikovsky’s departure from Moscow was followed by a very artistically prolific era. He completed the opera Eugene Onegin, the Symphony №4 in F Minor, and the Violin Concerto in D Major at the beginning of 1878. He worked on the opera The Maid of Orleans, which was poorly received, from December 1878 to August 1879. Tchaikovsky composed the masterful symphonies Manfred (1885) and Symphony №5 in E Minor during the following ten years, as well as the operas Mazepa (1883), which was based on Alexander Pushkin’s Poltava, and The Enchantress (1887). (1888). Serenade for Strings in C Major, Opus 48 (1880), Capriccio Italian (1880), and the 1812 Overture are some of his other notable compositions from this time (1880).
Beginning in 1885, Tchaikovsky decided to stay put after becoming weary of his travels and rented a rural home outside of Moscow, close to Klin. There, he established a regular daily schedule that included reading, woodland walks, morning and afternoon composition sessions, and piano duets with friends in the evenings. During the debut of his opera Cherevichki in January 1887, he overcome his ingrained phobia of conducting. Additionally, he started his first concert tour in Europe as a conductor at the end of December, visiting Leipzig, Berlin, Prague, Hamburg, Paris, and London. After experiencing considerable success, he embarked on a second tour in 1889. He wrote The Sleeping Beauty, his second ballet, from October 1888 to August 1889. He spent the winter of 1890 in Florence working on his third Pushkin opera, The Queen of Spades, which is regarded as one of his best and was composed in just 44 days. Later that year, Nadezhda von Meck warned Tchaikovsky that she was in danger of going bankrupt and was unable to continue receiving his stipend. This was followed by the end of their correspondence, which caused Tchaikovsky much distress.
At the opening of Carnegie Hall in New York City in the spring of 1891, Tchaikovsky received an invitation to go to the country. In Philadelphia, Baltimore, and New York, he performed for enthused crowds. His final two theatrical works, the one-act opera Iolanta (1891) and a two-act ballet Nutcracker, were finished when he returned to Russia (1892). His Symphony №6 in B Minor (Pathétique), which would eventually become his most well-known composition, was the first piece he started writing in February 1893. He gave it as a gift to his nephew Vladimir (Bob) Davydov, who in the composer’s latter years became to be the focus of his intense devotion. His successful trips to Europe and the United States and his receipt of an honorary degree from the University of Cambridge in June 1893 served as proof of his international standing. The premiere of Tchaikovsky’s new symphony was conducted in St. Petersburg on October 16. The composer, however, continued to feel that the symphony ranked among his finest pieces despite the audience’s divided response. He had acute illness on October 21 and was later found to have the cholera outbreak, which was raging across St. Petersburg at the time. He was saved by doctors, but four days later he passed away due to disease-related complications. Wild stories about his alleged suicide were spread by his contemporaries and resurfaced by some of his biographers in the late 20th century, but there is no proof to back up these claims.
Critics were incredibly unfair in their harsh judgments about Tchaikovsky’s life and work during most of the 20th century. Russian musicians criticized his aesthetic during his lifetime for not being sufficiently patriotic. However, he rose to official status in the Soviet Union, where no criticism of him was permitted and no in-depth analyses of his personality were conducted. However, Tchaikovsky was frequently criticized in Europe and North America for being homosexual, and his music was seen as a representation of his vice. His persona was characterized as morbid, neurotic, or guilty, and his life was a constant emotional upheaval. His writings were labeled as vulgar, sentimental, and even pathological. This view was the product of a misconception that, through the years, retroactively applied to the past the way homosexuality is perceived now. The detailed examination of Tchaikovsky’s letters and diaries, which were first made accessible to academics in their unedited form at the start of the 21st century, led to the revelation that this conventional image was fundamentally incorrect. There is no reason to think that Tchaikovsky was particularly neurotic or that his music contains any coded messages, as some theorists have suggested because the archival information clearly shows that he finally succeeded in adjusting to the social conditions of his period. His creative theory placed a high value on what is sometimes referred to as “emotional development,” or the creation of an instant connection with the audience via the expectation and ultimate realization of catharsis. While making no philosophical claims, his music eloquently and deeply sincere portrays the joys, loves, and tragedies of the human heart. Tchaikovsky predicted some sensitivities that subsequently became prominent in the culture of Russian modernism in his endeavor to combine the sublime with the contemplative as well as in the symbolism of his later works.
Romanticism in its distinctively Russian form, which owes as much to the French and Italian musical traditions as it does to the German, was best exemplified by Tchaikovsky. Tchaikovsky was influenced by Russian folk music, but not as overtly as the nationalist composers like Modest Mussorgsky and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. Igor Stravinsky, a composer of Russian descent, stated that Tchaikovsky “drew intuitively from the authentic, popular roots of our people.” He was the first significant Russian symphonist and showed a special talent for melody and orchestration. The strong melodies that underscore musical topics are harmonized into exquisite, formally inventive compositions in his greatest work. The majority of his compositions may be easily recognized by their distinctive sonorities thanks to his inventive instrumentation. Except for Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, Tchaikovsky’s operas, which are sometimes varied in subject matter and form, do not garner much recognition in the West. Tchaikovsky was essentially a master of instrumental music. Despite the low commercial success of the majority of his operas, Tchaikovsky was extremely successful in turning ballet — at the time a big ornamental gesture — into a staged musical drama. In doing so, he transformed the genre.
Tchaikovsky also added design integrity that raised dance to the same level as symphonic music. To achieve this, in contrast to the more random or ornamental arrangement in the ballets of his predecessors, he used a symphonist’s sense of large-scale organization, structuring subsequent dances through the use of keys to create a cumulative sensation of purpose. His unique understanding of how a song can inspire dance earned his ballets a distinctive position in theaters throughout the globe. His experiments had an impact on Sergey Prokofiev’s and Aram Khachaturian’s ballets. The symphonic poems of Tchaikovsky include the whole spectrum of expressive and stylistic elements that characterize the genre. They are part of the line of development in single-movement programmatic works started by Franz Liszt. The early Fatum (1868) exhibits flexibility of form and modernist expression at one extreme. The Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture, which exhibits the classical calm of the sonata form while balancing impassioned Romanticism, is at the other extreme. By adding unconventional meter in the scherzo of the Second String Quartet in F Major, Opus 22 (1874), and weakening the feeling of the key in the finale, Tchaikovsky also removed the restrictions of chamber music. The second movement of the string sextet Souvenir de Florence (1890), for which he composed music that delights in nearly pure sound-effect — something more recognizable in the orchestral sphere — shows off his creativity as well. His mastery of counterpoint, the foundational technique of chamber music, is evident in all of his chamber compositions.
Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, maintained a mostly conventional approach to solo piano music, which fulfilled the 19th-century craze for little salon pieces with descriptive names, typically grouped in groups, as in the well-known The Seasons (1875–76). Tchaikovsky’s lyrical flare may be heard in a few of his piano compositions, but overall, these pieces show him to be less dedicated than his symphonic music, concertos, operas, and chamber music. Tchaikovsky chose an odd course between the global outlook favored by his conservatory training and the Russian nationalist aspirations so evident in the work of his opponents in The Five. He was a skilled technical Westernizer and a Russian nationalist. With his final three symphonies, he made his mark on the late-19th-century symphony; they exhibit a heightened subjectivity that influenced Gustav Mahler, Sergey Rachmaninoff, and Dmitry Shostakovich and helped the form enter the 20th century with newfound energy. It is undeniable that Tchaikovsky’s body of work still has unequal quality. Some of his songs lack originality and are hurriedly composed, repetitive, or self-indulgent. But in several of his overtures, suites, and songs, as well as his №4, №5, №6, and Manfred symphonies, he managed to attain the unity of melodic inspiration, dramatic meaning, and mastery of form that raises him to the top echelon of the world’s composers.
