Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840 (April 25 by the Julian calendar Russia still used), in Votkinsk, a company town in Vyatka Governorate built around a large state ironworks. His father, Ilya Petrovich Tchaikovsky, was a lieutenant colonel and engineer in the Department of Mines who managed the works; his mother, Alexandra Andreyevna (née d'Assier), was his father's second wife and came from a family of French descent. The household was prosperous and cultured, and a mechanical organ known as an orchestrion — which played arrangements of Mozart, Rossini, and Bellini — made an enormous impression on the boy, who was described by his French governess Fanny Dürbach as unusually sensitive, quick to tears, and "a porcelain child."

In 1850, at the age of ten, Tchaikovsky was sent from his provincial home to the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in Saint Petersburg, an elite boarding school that prepared boys for careers in the civil service; he spent two years in its preparatory division before formal enrollment. The separation from his mother was shattering, and it was compounded in 1854 when she died of cholera, when he was fourteen — a loss he described decades later as one he had never recovered from, and which several biographers connect to the recurring preoccupation with fate and catastrophe in his mature music. He graduated on June 10, 1859, aged nineteen, with the rank of titular counselor, and took a clerkship in the Ministry of Justice, where he worked without much distinction for the next several years.

In 1861 Tchaikovsky enrolled in music theory classes offered by the Russian Musical Society, and when those classes became the Saint Petersburg Conservatory — Russia's first — in 1862, he entered as a member of its founding class, studying harmony and counterpoint with Nikolai Zaremba and instrumentation and composition with the conservatory's formidable director, Anton Rubinstein. In 1863 he resigned from the Ministry of Justice to devote himself entirely to music, a decision that cost him his salary and bewildered his family. He graduated in December 1865; his graduation exercise was a cantata on Schiller's "Ode to Joy," the same text Beethoven had set in his Ninth Symphony, and it was coolly received by a Saint Petersburg critical establishment that included César Cui.

Nikolai Rubinstein — younger brother of Anton, and the driving force behind the new Moscow branch of the Russian Musical Society — recruited the freshly graduated Tchaikovsky to teach music theory, and in January 1866 the composer moved to Moscow, initially lodging in Rubinstein's own apartment because the salary was so meager. When the Moscow Conservatory formally opened that September, Tchaikovsky was among its founding faculty. During the same year he composed his Symphony No. 1 in G minor, subtitled "Winter Daydreams," driving himself to insomnia, hallucinations, and what he described as a nervous collapse in the process. Anton Rubinstein and Zaremba both criticized the score harshly, but Tchaikovsky retained an unusual affection for it, later writing that he preferred it to many of his more polished later works.

During the 1868 opera season in Moscow, Tchaikovsky became closely attached to the Belgian soprano Désirée Artôt, five years his senior and already an international star; by the end of the year the two were discussing marriage, to the alarm of Nikolai Rubinstein and other friends who feared it would derail his career, and to the cautious interest of his father. The plan dissolved when Artôt left on tour and, in September 1869, married the Spanish baritone Mariano Padilla y Ramos. Tchaikovsky's reaction appears to have been more wounded pride than heartbreak — he continued a cordial professional friendship with her for the rest of his life and later set songs for her — but he claimed in old age that she was the only woman he ever loved.

In 1869 Mily Balakirev, the leader of the nationalist group known as "The Five," proposed a Shakespeare subject to Tchaikovsky and then supervised the result with relentless, sometimes brutal detail, sending back page after page of criticism and even suggesting key schemes. Tchaikovsky rewrote the overture-fantasy substantially in 1870 and revised it again in 1880 into the version now performed. The result — a sonata-form drama built from a chorale representing Friar Laurence, a jagged feud theme, and one of the most famous love melodies ever written — is widely regarded as the first fully characteristic Tchaikovsky masterpiece, and the first work in which his gift for long-breathed melody and searing orchestral climax operates at full strength.

Short of money in 1871, Tchaikovsky organized a concert of his own works and composed the String Quartet No. 1 in D major, Op. 11, for the occasion. Its second movement, the Andante cantabile, builds on a Russian folk melody he had reportedly heard sung by a plasterer at his sister's estate at Kamenka in Ukraine, set over muted, hushed accompaniment. In 1876 Leo Tolstoy attended a performance at the Moscow Conservatory and was reduced to tears by the movement; Tchaikovsky, who revered Tolstoy, recorded in his diary that he had never in his life been so flattered or so proud of his powers as a composer as he was by that moment.

Tchaikovsky composed the Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor between November 1874 and February 1875, and on Christmas Eve 1874 he played it through for Nikolai Rubinstein, whom he had hoped would premiere it. By Tchaikovsky's own account — written to Nadezhda von Meck three years later — Rubinstein sat in silence, then denounced the concerto as worthless, unplayable, vulgar, and stolen from other composers. Tchaikovsky refused to alter a bar and rededicated the work to Hans von Bülow, who gave the premiere in Boston on October 25, 1875, to an enthusiastic reception. Rubinstein eventually reversed his judgment entirely, conducted the Moscow premiere that December, and became a devoted advocate of the piece.

In May 1875 Vladimir Begichev, an official of the Moscow Imperial Theatres, commissioned Tchaikovsky to compose a full-length ballet for 800 rubles; he completed Swan Lake by April 1876, and it premiered at the Bolshoi Theatre on March 4, 1877, choreographed by Julius Reisinger. Reviews were mixed to dismissive — critics found it too loud, too symphonic, and too "Wagnerian" for dance — yet the production ran for six years and forty-one performances, a respectable life by the standards of the house. The version the world knows comes from the posthumous 1895 Mariinsky revival choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, with the score reordered and revised by Riccardo Drigo.

In late 1876 Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck, the widow of a railway magnate and an intensely private, musically obsessive woman, began commissioning small works from Tchaikovsky and soon settled on him an allowance of 6,000 rubles a year — enough to free him from teaching altogether. Her one absolute condition was that they never meet. Between 1877 and 1890 they exchanged over 1,200 letters of remarkable intimacy, addressing each other in terms neither used with anyone else, and the arrangement held: on the one occasion they encountered one another by accident, near her Simaki estate in August 1879, they exchanged no words. In October 1890 she abruptly ended both the subsidy and the correspondence, citing bankruptcy — a claim that was not literally true.

In the spring of 1877 Antonina Ivanovna Miliukova, a former Moscow Conservatory student, began sending Tchaikovsky declarations of love; he scarcely remembered meeting her, but — hoping to quiet rumors about his homosexuality, to reassure his family, and, as he told his brother, to make his own life bearable — he proposed, and they married in Moscow on July 18, 1877. The marriage collapsed within weeks. Tchaikovsky found her presence unendurable, fled after roughly six weeks on the pretext of a short business trip, suffered a severe nervous breakdown, and left Russia altogether. Divorce proved legally impossible under imperial law without an admission of adultery that Antonina refused to make, and they remained married until his death.

Begun in 1877 and completed in early 1878, the Symphony No. 4 in F minor was written across the months of Tchaikovsky's disastrous marriage and its aftermath, and it is inseparable from his correspondence with Nadezhda von Meck, to whom he dedicated it with the inscription "to my best friend" rather than her name. In a celebrated letter he described the opening brass fanfare as Fate — "the fatal power which prevents one from attaining the goal of happiness" — and traced a programme through the movements from that inescapable force to the folk-festival finale. Nikolai Rubinstein conducted the premiere in Moscow on February 22, 1878; the pizzicato ostinato scherzo, for strings plucked throughout, is one of the most distinctive movements in the symphonic repertoire.

Tchaikovsky began Eugene Onegin in May 1877 and finished it in January 1878, setting Pushkin's verse novel not as a conventional grand opera but as a sequence of intimate episodes he called "lyric scenes." Convinced that the work demanded simplicity and sincerity rather than theatrical display — and afraid that a professional company would coarsen it — he entrusted the premiere to students of the Moscow Conservatory, who gave it at the Maly Theatre on March 29, 1879, conducted by Nikolai Rubinstein. The professional premiere followed at the Bolshoi on January 23, 1881, under Eduard Nápravník, and the opera went on to become the most-performed Russian opera in the world.

Convalescing at Clarens on Lake Geneva in March 1878 with his former pupil, the violinist Iosif Kotek, Tchaikovsky wrote the Violin Concerto in D major in a burst of about a month, with Kotek advising on the solo writing. He dedicated it to Leopold Auer, the leading violinist in Russia, who declined to play it and forced the cancellation of the planned premiere on the grounds that parts of it were unviolinistic. Adolph Brodsky finally gave the first performance in Vienna on December 4, 1881, under Hans Richter, and Eduard Hanslick responded with a review of legendary viciousness, writing that the concerto confronted the listener with "the revolting thought that music can exist which stinks to the ear."

Nikolai Rubinstein asked Tchaikovsky for a festival piece to mark the 1882 Moscow Arts and Industry Exhibition and the near-completion of the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, itself built to commemorate the defeat of Napoleon in 1812. Tchaikovsky wrote the 1812 Overture in about six weeks in the autumn of 1880, complaining to von Meck that it would be "very loud and noisy, but without artistic merit, because I wrote it without warmth and without love." Almost simultaneously he composed the Serenade for String Orchestra, Op. 48, which he loved unreservedly and described as written from inner compulsion. The 1812 premiered in Moscow on August 20, 1882, under Ippolit Al'tani — without, in the event, its famous cannon.

Nikolai Rubinstein died in Paris on March 23, 1881, aged forty-five. Tchaikovsky, who owed him his career and had sparred with him for fifteen years, was in Rome when he heard and arrived in Paris too late to see the body. Nadezhda von Meck had repeatedly urged him to write a piano trio; he had refused, telling her he found the blend of piano and strings acoustically unnatural. After Rubinstein's death he changed his mind and wrote the Piano Trio in A minor, Op. 50, completed in January 1882 and inscribed "In memory of a great artist" — a vast, two-movement work whose second movement is a set of variations that collapses at the end into a funeral march.

From 1885 Tchaikovsky abandoned city living for a series of rented country houses near Klin, north of Moscow, establishing the rigidly ordered daily regime — work, a two-hour walk regardless of weather, more work — that governed the rest of his life. In the same period he conquered a lifelong terror of the podium and began conducting, embarking in 1888 on the first of several European tours that made him an international celebrity. The Symphony No. 5 in E minor, composed between May and August 1888 and premiered in Saint Petersburg on November 17, 1888 under his own baton, is built on a recurring "Fate" motto that begins as a funeral tread and ends as a blazing E major march. Tchaikovsky judged it insincere and a failure; audiences disagreed, and still do.

Ivan Vsevolozhsky, director of the Imperial Theatres, approached Tchaikovsky in May 1888 about a ballet, and the subject settled on Perrault's La Belle au bois dormant. The composer worked to extraordinarily precise instructions from the choreographer Marius Petipa — bar counts, tempi, characters, moods — and produced a score of symphonic ambition that he regarded as among his finest work. It premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre on January 15, 1890, conducted by Riccardo Drigo. Tsar Alexander III summoned him to the imperial box and said only "Very nice," which Tchaikovsky found deflating, though the Tsar promptly awarded him a substantial gratuity. In October of that year Nadezhda von Meck ended their thirteen-year correspondence.

Invited as guest of honour for the opening festival of Andrew Carnegie's new Music Hall on 57th Street in New York, Tchaikovsky crossed the Atlantic in April 1891 and conducted his Marche solennelle du couronnement — written for Alexander III's coronation in 1883 and revised for the occasion — at the inaugural concert on May 5, 1891. He appeared three more times during the opening week, including a performance of the Piano Concerto No. 1 with Adele Aus der Ohe, and also conducted in Baltimore, Washington, and Philadelphia. His diaries record astonishment at the scale of his American reputation alongside homesickness so acute that he wept in his hotel room.

Following the success of The Sleeping Beauty, Vsevolozhsky commissioned a double bill of an opera and a ballet; the results were Iolanta and The Nutcracker, after E. T. A. Hoffmann's tale by way of Dumas. Petipa devised the scenario but fell ill, and Lev Ivanov took over the choreography. The double bill premiered at the Mariinsky on December 18, 1892. Critics were lukewarm about the ballet — complaining of an unbalanced libretto, too many children, and a ballerina who barely danced before midnight — while praising the score. The Nutcracker Suite, drawn from it and premiered nine months earlier in March 1892, was an immediate sensation, with nearly every number encored.

Composed in 1893 and premiered in Saint Petersburg on October 28 with Tchaikovsky conducting, the Symphony No. 6 in B minor inverts the expected symphonic trajectory: a triumphant third-movement march is followed by a slow finale marked Adagio lamentoso that sinks into silence in the lowest register of the strings. Its second movement is a waltz written in five beats to the bar, so that it perpetually stumbles. Tchaikovsky told Rimsky-Korsakov the symphony had a programme, but refused to divulge it. The title "Pathétique" — from the Russian Patetichaskaya, closer to "impassioned" than to English "pathetic" — was suggested by his brother Modest, though accounts differ over how much Tchaikovsky liked it.

Tchaikovsky died in Saint Petersburg on November 6, 1893, aged fifty-three, nine days after conducting the premiere of the Pathétique. The cause recorded at the time was cholera, contracted — according to the account given by his brother Modest and his doctors — from a glass of unboiled water drunk at a restaurant a few days earlier. Beginning in 1979, the scholar Alexandra Orlova advanced a rival theory that he had been compelled to poison himself by a "court of honour" of former schoolmates to avert a scandal about his homosexuality. The claim rests on second- and third-hand testimony and has been contested vigorously by other specialists; the honest summary is Roland John Wiley's: "we do not know how Tchaikovsky died."