«Music has
healing power. It has the
ability to get people out of themselves for a few hours. “Elton John.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Russian composer
Alternate titles: Peter
Ilich Tschaikovsky, Pyotr Ilyich Chaikovskii, Pyotr Ilyich Chaikovsky
By Alexander Poznansky • Last Updated: May
3, 2022 • Edit History
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Born:
May 7, 1840 Votkinsk
Russia
Died:
November 6, 1893 (aged 53) St. Petersburg Russia
Notable Works:
“Cherevichki” “Eugene Onegin” “Marche Slave, Op. 31” “Pathétique
Symphony” “Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Minor” “Romeo and Juliet” “Sixth
Symphony” “Swan Lake” “Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, Op. 36” “The
Nutcracker” “The
Oprichnik” “The Queen of Spades” “The Sleeping Beauty” “The Storm” “The
Voyevoda” “Vakula the Smith”
Movement / Style:
Romanticism
Top Questions
Top Questions
1. What is Pyotr Ilyich
Tchaikovsky most famous for?
Tchaikovsky's most popular compositions
include music for the ballets Swan Lake (1877), The Sleeping Beauty (1889),
and The Nutcracker (1892). He is also famous for the Romeo and Juliet
overture (1870) and celebrated for Symphony No. 6 in B Minor (Pathétique)
(1893).
2.Where is Tchaikovsky
from?
Vótkinsk, Rusia
3.What was Tchaikovsky's history?
Discussion of Tchaikovsky's personal
life, especially his sexuality, has perhaps been the most extensive of any
composer in the 19th century and certainly of any Russian composer of
his time.
What is Tchaikovsky's best
piece?
4.What is Tchaikovsky's
best piece?
His best-known works include
his First Piano Concerto, the ballets Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The
Nutcracker, the 1812 Overture (the one with the cannons), the Violin Concerto,
and his Sixth “Pathétique” Symphony.
5. What was Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s family
like?
Tchaikovsky was the second
of six surviving children of Ilya Tchaikovsky, a manager of the Kamsko-Votkinsk
metal works, and Alexandra Assier, who died when Tchaikovsky was in his teens
Tchaikovsky married Antonina Milyukova, a young music student, in 1877. He left
her after a few weeks.
6.Where
was Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky educated?
Tchaikovsky graduated from
the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1865. He was among its first students when
it opened in 1862. His first music lessons began in 1845.
Pyotr
Ilyich Tchaikovsky, Tchaikovsky also spelled Chaikovsky, Chaikovskii, or Tschaikowsky,
name in full Anglicized as Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky, (born April 25 [May
7, New Style], 1840, Votkinsk, Russia—died October 25
[November 6], 1893, St. Petersburg), the most popular Russian composer of all
time. His music has always had great appeal for the general public in virtue of
its tuneful, open-hearted melodies, impressive harmonies, and colourful,
picturesque orchestration, all of which evoke a profound emotional response.
His oeuvre includes 7 symphonies, 11
operas, 3 ballets, 5 suites, 3 piano concertos, a violin
concerto, 11 overtures (strictly speaking, 3 overtures and 8 single movement
programmatic orchestral works), 4 cantatas, 20 choral works, 3 string quartets,
a string sextet, and more than 100 songs and piano pieces.
Early years
Tchaikovsky was the second
of six surviving children of Ilya Tchaikovsky, a manager of the Kamsko-Votkinsk
metal works, and Alexandra Assier, a descendant of French émigrés. He manifested a clear interest in music
from childhood, and his earliest musical impressions came from an orchestrina in the family home. At age four
he made his first recorded attempt at composition, a song
written with his younger sister Alexandra. In 1845 he began taking piano
lessons with a local tutor, through which he became familiar with Frédéric Chopin’s mazurkas and the
piano pieces of Friedrich Kalkbrenner. Since music
education was not available in Russian institutions at that time, Tchaikovsky’s
parents had not considered that their son might pursue a musical career.
Instead, they chose to prepare the high-strung and sensitive boy for a career
in the civil service.
In 1850 Tchaikovsky entered
the prestigious Imperial School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg, a boarding institution
for young boys, where he spent nine years. He proved a diligent and successful
student who was popular among his peers. At the same time Tchaikovsky formed in
this all-male environment intense emotional ties with
several of his schoolmates.
In 1854 his mother fell
victim to cholera and died. During the boy’s last
years at the school, Tchaikovsky’s father finally came to realize his son’s
vocation and invited the professional teacher Rudolph Kündinger to give him
piano lessons. At age 17 Tchaikovsky came under the influence of the Italian
singing instructor Luigi Piccioli, the first person to appreciate his musical
talents, and thereafter Tchaikovsky developed a lifelong passion for Italian
music. Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s Don
Giovanni proved another revelation that deeply affected his musical taste.
In the summer of 1861 he traveled outside Russia
for the first time, visiting Germany,
France, and England, and in October of that year he began attending music
classes offered by the recently founded Russian Musical Society. When St.
Petersburg Conservatory opened the following fall, Tchaikovsky was among its
first students. After making the decision to dedicate his life to music, he
resigned from the Ministry of Justice, where he had been employed as
a clerk.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 1860.
Tchaikovsky spent nearly
three years at St. Petersburg Conservatory, studying harmony
and counterpoint with Nikolay Zaremba and
composition and instrumentation with Anton Rubinstein. Among his earliest
orchestral works was an overture
entitled The Storm (composed 1864), a mature attempt at dramatic program
music. The first public performance of any of his works took
place in August 1865, when Johann Strauss the Younger conducted
Tchaikovsky’s Characteristic Dances at a concert in Pavlovsk, near St.
Petersburg.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky autograph score
Autograph score of Pyotr
Ilyich Tchaikovsky's song “My Genius, My Angel, My Friend” (1858), the earliest
known of his autograph scores.
Tchaikovsky House Museum,
Klin, Russia
Middle years
After graduating in
December 1865, Tchaikovsky moved to Moscow to teach music theory at the Russian
Musical Society, soon thereafter renamed the Moscow Conservatory. He found
teaching difficult, but his friendship with the director, Nikolay Rubinstein,
who had offered him the position in the first place, helped make it bearable.
Within five years Tchaikovsky had produced his first symphony,
Symphony No. 1 in G Minor (composed 1866; Winter Daydreams), and
his first opera, The Voyevoda (1868).
In 1868 Tchaikovsky met a
Belgian mezzo-soprano named Désirée Artôt, with whom he fleetingly
contemplated a marriage, but their engagement ended in failure. The opera The
Voyevoda was well received, even by the The
Five, an influential group of nationalistic Russian composers
who never appreciated the cosmopolitanism of Tchaikovsky’s music. In 1869
Tchaikovsky completed Romeo and Juliet, an overture in
which he subtly adapted sonata form to mirror the dramatic
structure of Shakespeare’s play. Nikolay Rubinstein
conducted a successful performance of this work the following year, and it
became the first of Tchaikovsky’s compositions eventually to enter the
standard international classical repertoire.
In March 1871 the audience
at Moscow’s Hall of Nobility witnessed the successful performance of
Tchaikovsky’s String Quartet No. 1, and in April 1872 he finished
another opera, The Oprichnik. While spending the summer at his sister’s
estate in Ukraine, he began to work on his Symphony
No. 2 in C Minor, later dubbed The Little Russian, which he
completed later that year. The Oprichnik was first performed at the Maryinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg in
April 1874. Despite its initial success, the opera did not convince the
critics, with whom Tchaikovsky ultimately agreed. His next opera, Vakula the
Smith (1874), later revised as Cherevichki (1885; The Little
Shoes), was similarly judged. In his early operas the young composer
experienced difficulty in striking a balance between creative
fervour and his ability to assess critically the work in progress. However, his
instrumental works began to earn him his reputation, and, at the end of 1874,
Tchaikovsky wrote his Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat Minor,
a work destined for fame despite its initial rejection by Rubinstein. The
concerto premiered successfully in Boston in October 1875, with Hans von Bülow as the soloist. During
the summer of 1875, Tchaikovsky composed Symphony No. 3 in D Major,
which gained almost immediate acclaim in Russia.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 1874.
Library of Congress,
Washington, D.C. (file no. LC-USZ62-128254)
Years of fame of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
At the very end of 1875,
Tchaikovsky left Russia to travel in Europe. He was
powerfully impressed by a performance of Georges Bizet’s Carmen at the
Opéra-Comique in Paris; in contrast, the production of Richard Wagner’s Ring cycle,
which he attended in Bayreuth, Germany,
during the summer of 1876, left him cold. In November 1876 he put the final
touches on his symphonic fantasia
Francesca da Rimini, a work with which he felt particularly pleased.
Earlier that year, Tchaikovsky had completed the composition of Swan Lake, which was the first in
his famed trilogy of ballets. The ballet’s
premiere took place on February 20, 1877, but it was not a success owing to
poor staging and choreography, and it was soon dropped from the repertoire.
Swan Lake autograph score by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Page from the autograph
score of the ballet Swan Lake, by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 1876.
Tchaikovsky House Museum,
Klin, Russia
The growing popularity of
Tchaikovsky’s music both within and outside of Russia
inevitably resulted in public interest in him and his personal life. Although homosexuality
was officially illegal in Russia, the authorities tolerated it among the upper
classes. But social and familial pressures, as well as his discomfort with the
fact that his younger brother Modest was exhibiting the same sexual tendencies,
led to Tchaikovsky’s hasty decision in the summer of 1877 to marry Antonina
Milyukova, a young and naive music student who had declared her love for him.
Tchaikovsky’s homosexuality, combined
with an almost complete lack of compatibility between the couple, resulted in
matrimonial disaster—within weeks he fled abroad, never again to live with his
wife.
This experience forced Tchaikovsky to recognize that he could not find
respectability through social conventions and that his sexual
orientation could not be changed. On February 13, 1878, he wrote
his brother Anatoly from Florence: “Only now, especially after the tale of my
marriage, have I finally begun to understand that there is nothing more
fruitless than not wanting to be that which I am by nature.”
The year 1876 saw the
beginning of the extraordinary relationship that developed between Tchaikovsky
and Nadezhda von Meck, the widow of a
wealthy railroad tycoon; it became an important component of their lives for
the next 14 years. A great admirer of his work, she chose to become his
patroness and eventually arranged for him a regular monthly allowance;
Nadezhda von
Meck
this
enabled him in 1878 to resign from the conservatory and devote his efforts to
writing music. Thereafter he could afford to spend the winters in Europe and
return to Russia each summer. Although he and his benefactor agreed never to meet, they
engaged in a voluminous correspondence that constitutes a remarkable historical and
literary record. In the course of it they frankly exchanged their views on a
broad spectrum of issues, starting with politics or ideology and ending with such topics as
the psychology of creativity, religious faith, and the nature of love.
The period after
Tchaikovsky’s departure from Moscow proved creatively very productive. Early in
1878 he finished several of his most famous compositions—the opera Eugene
Onegin, the Symphony No. 4 in F Minor, and the Violin Concerto in
D Major. From December 1878 to August 1879 he worked on the opera The
Maid of Orleans, which was not particularly well received. Over the next 10
years Tchaikovsky produced his operas Mazepa (1883; based on Aleksandr Pushkin’s Poltava) and
The Enchantress (1887), as well as the masterly symphonies Manfred
(1885) and Symphony No. 5 in E Minor (1888). His other major
achievements of this period include Serenade for Strings in C Major, Opus
48 (1880), Capriccio italien (1880), and the 1812 Overture
(1880).
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky letter
First page of one of Pyotr
Ilyich Tchaikovsky's letters to his publisher, Pyotr Jurgenson, 1882.
Tchaikovsky House Museum,
Klin, Russia
Final years
At the beginning of 1885,
tired of his peregrinations, Tchaikovsky settled down in a rented country house
near Klin, outside of Moscow. There he adopted a regular daily routine that
included reading, walking in the forest, composing in the mornings and the
afternoons, and playing piano duets with friends in the evenings. At the January
1887 premiere of his opera Cherevichki, he finally overcame his
longstanding fear of conducting. Moreover, at the end of December he embarked
upon his first European concert tour as a conductor, which included Leipzig,
Berlin, Prague, Hamburg, Paris, and London. He met with great
success and made a second tour in 1889. Between October 1888 and August 1889 he
composed his second ballet, The Sleeping Beauty. During the winter of
1890, while staying in Florence, he concentrated on his third Pushkin opera,
The Queen of Spades, which was written in just 44 days and is considered
one of his finest. Later that year Tchaikovsky was informed by Nadezhda von
Meck that she was close to ruin and could not continue his allowance. This was
followed by the cessation of their correspondence, a circumstance that caused Tchaikovsky
considerable anguish.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, 1890.
Tchaikovsky House Museum,
Klin, Russia
In the spring of 1891
Tchaikovsky was invited to visit the United States on the occasion of the
inauguration of Carnegie Hall in New
York City. He conducted before enthusiastic audiences in New
York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia. Upon his return to Russia, he
completed his last two compositions for the stage—the one-act
opera Iolanta (1891) and a two-act ballet Nutcracker (1892). In
February 1893 he began working on his Symphony No. 6 in B Minor (Pathétique), which was destined to become his most
celebrated masterpiece. He dedicated it to his nephew Vladimir (Bob) Davydov,
who in Tchaikovsky’s late years became increasingly an object of his passionate
love. His world stature was confirmed by his triumphant European and American
tours and his acceptance in June 1893 of an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky,
oil on canvas by Nikolai Kuznetsov, 1893.
©
AISA—Everett/Shutterstock.com
On October 16 Tchaikovsky
conducted his new symphony’s premiere in St. Petersburg. The mixed reaction of
the audience, however, did not affect the composer’s belief that the symphony
belonged among his best work. On October 21 he suddenly became ill and was
diagnosed with cholera, an epidemic that was sweeping through St.
Petersburg. Despite all medical efforts to save him, he died four days later
from complications arising from the disease. Wild rumours circulated among his
contemporaries concerning his possible suicide,
which were revived in the late 20th century by some of his biographers, but
these allegations cannot be supported by documentary evidence.
Legacy
For most of the 20th
century, critics were profoundly unjust in their severe pronouncements
regarding Tchaikovsky’s life and music. During his lifetime, Russian musicians
attacked his style as insufficiently nationalistic. In the Soviet
Union, however, he became an official icon, of whom no adverse criticism was tolerated; by the same
token, no in-depth studies were made of his personality. But in Europe and North
America, Tchaikovsky often was judged on the basis of his
sexuality, and his music was interpreted as the manifestation of his deviance. His life
was portrayed as an incessant emotional turmoil, his character as morbid,
hysterical, or guilt-ridden, and his works were proclaimed vulgar, sentimental,
and even pathological. This interpretation was the result of a fallacy that
over the course of decades projected the current perception of homosexuality
onto the past. At the turn of the 21st century, a close scrutiny of
Tchaikovsky’s correspondence and diaries, which finally became available to
scholars in their uncensored form, led to the realization that this traditional
portrayal was fundamentally wrong. As the archival material makes clear,
Tchaikovsky eventually succeeded in his adjustment to the social realities of
his time, and there is no reason to believe that he was particularly neurotic
or that his music possesses any coded messages, as some theorists have claimed.
His artistic philosophy
gave priority to what may be called “emotional progression”—i.e., the
establishment of an immediate rapport with the audience through the
anticipation and eventual achievement of catharsis. His music does not claim intellectual depth but conveys the
joys, loves, and sorrows of the human heart with striking and poignant sincerity. In his attempt to
synthesize the sublime with the introspective, and
also in the symbolism of his later music, Tchaikovsky anticipated certain
sensibilities that later became prominent in the culture of Russian modernism.
Tchaikovsky was the leading
exponent of Romanticism in its characteristically
Russian mold, which owes as much to the French and Italian musical traditions
as it does to the German. Although not as ostentatiously as the nationalist
composers, such as Modest Mussorgsky and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky
was clearly inspired by Russian folk
music. In the words of the Russian-born composer Igor Stravinsky, “Tchaikovsky drew
unconsciously from the true, popular sources of our race.”
The first great Russian
symphonist, he exhibited a particular gift for melody
and orchestration. In his best work, the powerful tunes underlining musical
themes are harmonized into magnificent, formally innovative compositions. His
resourceful use of instruments allows easy identification of most of his works
by their characteristic sonority. Tchaikovsky excelled primarily as a master of
instrumental music; his operas, often eclectic in subject matter and style,
do not find much appreciation in the West, with the exception of Eugene Onegin and The Queen of
Spades. Whereas most of his operas met with limited success, Tchaikovsky
nonetheless proved eminently successful in transforming ballet, then a grand
decorative gesture, into a staged musical drama, and thus he revolutionized the
genre.
Moreover, Tchaikovsky
brought an integrity of design that elevated
ballet to the level of symphonic music. To this end, he employed a symphonist’s
sense of large-scale structure, organizing successive dances through the use of
keys to create a cumulative feeling of purpose, in
distinction to the more random or decorative layout in the ballets of his
predecessors. His special sense of how melody can engender the dance
gave his ballets a unique place in the world’s theatres. The influence of his
experimentation is evident in the ballets of Sergey Prokofiev and Aram Khachaturian.
Tchaikovsky’s symphonic
poems are part of the line of development in single-movement
programmatic works initiated by Franz Liszt, and they run the gamut of expressive
and stylistic features that typify the genre. At one extreme the early Fatum
(1868) shows a freedom of form and modernist expression. At the other extreme
is the classical poise of the Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture,
in which passionate Romanticism is counterbalanced by the rigours of the sonata
form. Furthermore, Tchaikovsky loosened the strictures of chamber
music by introducing unorthodox meter
in the scherzo of the Second String Quartet in F Major, Opus 22 (1874),
and undermining the sense of key
in the finale. His innovation is also evident in the
second movement of the string sextet Souvenir de Florence (1890), for
which he wrote music that revels in almost pure sound-effect—something more
familiar in the orchestral sphere. His skill in counterpoint, the traditional bedrock
of chamber music, can also be seen throughout his chamber works.
Tchaikovsky’s approach to
solo piano music, on the other hand, remained mostly traditional, that is, it
more or less satisfied the 19th-century taste for short salon pieces with
descriptive titles, usually arranged in groups, as in the famous The Seasons
(1875–76). In several of his piano pieces, Tchaikovsky’s melodic flair
surfaces, but on the whole he was far less committed when composing these works
than he was when writing his orchestral music, concertos, operas, and chamber
compositions.
Tchaikovsky steered an
unlikely path between the Russian nationalist tendencies so prominent in the
work of his rivals in The Five and the cosmopolitan stance encouraged by his
conservatory training. He was both a Russian nationalist and a Westernizer of
polished technical skill. He put his personal stamp on the late-19th-century
symphony with his last three symphonies; they demonstrate a heightened subjectivity
that would influence Gustav Mahler, Sergey Rachmaninoff, and Dmitry Shostakovich and encourage the
genre to pass with renewed vigour into the 20th century.
It cannot be denied that
the quality of Tchaikovsky’s oeuvre remains uneven. Some of his
music is undistinguished—hastily written, repetitious, or self-indulgent. But
in such symphonies as his No. 4, No. 5, No. 6, and Manfred
and in many of his overtures, suites, and songs, he achieved the unity of
melodic inspiration, dramatic content, and mastery of form that elevates him to
the premiere rank of the world’s composers.
Mausoleum
With affection,
Ruben
Acomplish submission
