Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Early Life

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in 1840 in Votinsk, around 1000 kilometres east of Moscow. His father was a mining engineer who, along with his wife, had a strong interest in music. Tchaikovsky eventually had six siblings, including Modest who became his closest confidante and future (somewhat unreliable) biographer.

The young Pyotr developed a passion for music at a very young age but his education was in an entirely different field. He studied at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in St Petersburg, becoming a civil servant in 1859 for around four years. Alongside, he enrolled in music classes run by the Russian Musical Society and was later one of the first students at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. He resigned from the Civil Service to study music full-time in 1863.

First Move to Moscow

He took up a teaching post at the Moscow Conservatory in 1866, where he remained for twelve years. This period saw his first professional breakthrough as a composer, with public performances of his First Symphony, the overture Romeo and Juliet and early attempts at opera. By the mid 1870s his music was increasingly well-received, and his First Piano Concerto was premiered in Boston, US. The ballet Swan Lake, while one of Tchaikovsky’s most famous works today, had more of a slow burn. Around this time, Tchaikovsky began corresponding with the wealthy Nadezhda von Meck, who became one of the most important people in his life, effectively financing his career for several years. They exchanged over 1200 letters but, by deliberate choice, never met in person.

Turmoil and Wanderlust

In 1877 Tchaikovsky married Antonina Milyukova, but soon realised it was a huge mistake. He was homosexual and had perhaps hoped for an outwardly conventional domestic setup; the failure of the marriage after only two months sent him into a deep depression. He resigned his post at Moscow shortly after, and embarked on a series of travels across Europe, often to France and Germany, or to estates belonging to Nadezhda von Meck. He wrote his Violin Concerto at Clarens, in Switzerland in 1878, and completed his opera Eugene Onegin, his first true success in the operatic field, the same year. He did not have a long-term relationship at any time in his life, though was devoted for many years to his nephew Vladimir Davydov, known as ‘Bob’.

Return to Moscow and Final Years

In his final years Tchaikovsky produced some of his most enduringly popular music, including Symphonies Nos 5 and 6, the ballets The Nutcracker and The Sleeping Beauty and the opera The Queen of Spades. At the same time he was busy as a conductor, travelling widely (including to the US) and advancing the cause of Russian music both at home and abroad. Nine days after the premiere of his Symphony No 6, ‘Pathétique’ he died on 6 November 1893, aged only 53. The cause of death was officially recorded as cholera, attributed to consumption of unboiled water during a local outbreak. Others have suggested he died by suicide. Tchaikovsky’s life – as well as the manner of his death – remain to this day the subject of much speculation.

Tchaikovsky loved and admired a whole range of composers, though Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was demonstrably the most important to him. In a letter to Nadezhda von Meck in 1878 he declared, poetically, that Mozart ‘wrote music as the nightingales sing’; in his diary he elevated Mozart to the position of a ‘musical Christ’.

While Mozart was Tchaikovsky’s ideal of a creative artist, Robert Schumann had more of a stylistic influence, especially his loosening of formal structure and the deeply emotional content of his output. Among his compatriots, Mikhail Glinka was the most significant, Tchaikovsky describing him as the ‘cornerstone’ of Russian music. When teaching at the Moscow Conservatory, he advocated Glinka’s fusion of Western and Russian musical styles, a practice he adopted himself with great success.

Tchaikovsky kept himself apart from the ‘Mighty Five’, the composers who formed a loose union in order to promote ‘Russianness’ in classical music (Mily Balakirev, Modest Mussorgsky, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Alexander Borodin and César Cui), though he was friendly with most of them. The group’s leader, Balakirev, devised the scenario for Tchaikovsky’s Romeo and Juliet.