1840–1893 · Russia · Romantic
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) was a Russian composer, conductor and teacher, one of the leading composers of the Romantic era. He wrote the ballets Swan Lake, The Nutcracker and The Sleeping Beauty, the operas Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, symphonies and piano pieces. Many of his pieces are part of children's music school programmes.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born into the family of a mining engineer. His father, Ilya Petrovich Tchaikovsky, managed the Kamsko-Votkinsk ironworks and lived there with his wife Alexandra Andreyevna, née d'Assier — of French and German descent through her father's side, a customs official. Their household was large, with servants and frequent guests — local nobility, engineers, and young people from the capital who came for training.
Pyotr came into the world on 7 May 1840 at the settlement attached to the Kamsko-Votkinsk works, in Vyatka Governorate — today the town of Votkinsk in Udmurtia. He was the second child in the family: his brother Nikolai, the eldest, had been born in 1838; later came his sister Alexandra, his brother Ippolit, and finally the twins Anatoly and Modest.
Music filled the house: as a young man his father played the flute, while his mother played the harp and piano and sang romances. There was a grand piano and also a mechanical barrel organ whose cylinders played excerpts from operas by Mozart, Rossini, Bellini and Donizetti — none left a stronger mark on little Pyotr than Zerlina's aria from Don Giovanni. His very first piano teacher was Maria Palchikova, and from 1844 the children's education was taken over by a governess brought in from France, Fanny Dürbach.
In 1850 ten-year-old Pyotr was sent to Saint Petersburg, to the Imperial School of Jurisprudence, a boarding school that trained boys for the civil service. Separation from his mother was a heavy blow: she soon returned to his father in the Urals, leaving Pyotr at boarding school more than a thousand kilometres from his family.
On 13 (25) June 1854 Tchaikovsky's mother, Alexandra Andreyevna, died of cholera; he was fourteen. Her death left a mark that stayed with him for the rest of his life, and it was around then that he made his earliest try at writing music — a waltz dedicated to her memory. Ilya Petrovich, who had fallen ill with cholera too but pulled through, hurried his son back into his lessons, hoping the routine would ease the boy's grief.
From 1855 to 1858 the pianist Rudolph Kündinger, hired by his father, gave Pyotr piano lessons. Asked about the boy's musical future, Kündinger said he saw no talent for composition and advised him to seek a post at the Ministry of Justice after finishing school. In May 1859 Tchaikovsky graduated from the School of Jurisprudence and soon entered the Ministry of Justice, where he handled cases involving peasants.
The idea of combining civil service with music lessons belonged to the composer's father: he secretly consulted Kündinger again and, despite the discouraging verdict on his son's talent, urged Pyotr to keep studying music. In 1861 Tchaikovsky enrolled in the music classes of the Russian Musical Society, which became the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1862. His teachers were Nikolai Zaremba, who taught counterpoint and musical form, and Anton Rubinstein, who taught composition and orchestration.
Until 1863 Tchaikovsky combined music with his civil-service job, then gave it up at Rubinstein's urging, choosing poverty and uncertainty over a steady career. His graduation piece was a cantata, Ode to Joy, on Schiller's text, performed at the end of December 1865; for it he received the large silver medal, the highest honour of the time.
While still a student, Tchaikovsky heard the first public performance of his music: on 30 August (11 September) 1865 in Pavlovsk, an orchestra conducted by Johann Strauss played his Characteristic Dances, later reused in his opera The Voyevoda.
In January 1866 Tchaikovsky moved to Moscow: Nikolai Rubinstein, brother of his teacher, offered him a professorship at the music classes soon to become the Moscow Conservatory. There Tchaikovsky taught harmony, music theory and orchestration while continuing to compose; these years produced his First Symphony and the opera The Voyevoda.
From 1868 Tchaikovsky also published music criticism and got to know the Saint Petersburg composers of The Five; despite differing musical views, they were on friendly terms. On the advice of the group's leader, Mily Balakirev, he wrote the fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet (1869) — his first truly acclaimed work. Every year he taught 60 to 90 students; among them was the future composer Sergei Taneyev.
The heavy teaching load left him too little time to compose, and things changed once a wealthy widow, Nadezhda von Meck, began sending him an annual allowance: this finally gave him room to step back from the conservatory. He taught his last class there on 6 October 1878, and his pupil Sergei Taneyev took over the post.
In the summer of 1877, absorbed in composing the opera Eugene Onegin, Tchaikovsky unexpectedly married a former conservatory student, Antonina Miliukova. The union quickly fell apart: after barely two and a half months together, an emotionally overwhelmed Tchaikovsky left for abroad with his brother Anatoly.
During these months Nadezhda von Meck stood by him — a wealthy widow whose late husband had made his fortune in railways. For years she was his patroness and closest correspondent, yet the two never once met face to face. It was to her that he dedicated the Fourth Symphony, inscribing the score "To my best friend" so as not to reveal her name.
Travelling abroad, Tchaikovsky gradually recovered, completed Eugene Onegin and the Fourth Symphony, and began work on his Violin Concerto. He returned to Russia in April 1878 and soon afterwards left the Moscow Conservatory.
In 1884 Emperor Alexander III awarded Tchaikovsky the Order of Saint Vladimir, fourth class — a mark of official recognition that strengthened the composer's social standing.
In 1885 Saint Petersburg saw a fresh staging of Eugene Onegin, and the Tsar granted Tchaikovsky a pension for life, paid annually — in practice making him the empire's foremost court composer. During the 1889–1890 season he took charge of the Russian Musical Society's Moscow branch, inviting celebrated foreign musicians — Brahms and Dvořák among them — to conduct.
Tchaikovsky increasingly appeared as a conductor: in January 1887 he first took the podium at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow, conducting his own opera Cherevichki, and later toured Russia, Ukraine and Western Europe. In 1888 in Saint Petersburg he himself conducted the premiere of his Fifth Symphony.
In 1891 Tchaikovsky travelled to the United States and conducted at the opening of Carnegie Hall in New York. In 1892 he became a member of the French Académie des Beaux-Arts — only the second Russian to be so honoured, after the sculptor Mark Antokolsky — and in 1893 the University of Cambridge awarded him an honorary doctorate in music.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky died in Saint Petersburg on 6 November 1893, aged 53, not long after conducting the premiere of his Sixth Symphony himself. He was buried at Tikhvin Cemetery in the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, near Borodin, Glinka and Mussorgsky.
Tchaikovsky left behind a large and varied body of work: ten operas, three ballets, seven symphonies (among them the programmatic Manfred), well over a hundred romances, plus choral pieces, cantatas, concertos, chamber ensembles and piano works of every kind. His best-known scores include Swan Lake, then The Sleeping Beauty, and, later, The Nutcracker among the ballets; Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades among the operas; and, besides these, the First Piano Concerto, the Violin Concerto, the 1812 Overture, and Symphony No. 6.
Among the composers who influenced Tchaikovsky, contemporaries named Robert Schumann — in form, harmony and piano writing — as well as Mozart, whom Tchaikovsky himself considered his favourite composer. Georges Bizet's opera Carmen made a strong impression on him, and he had studied Glinka's operas closely since childhood and knew their scores well.
Tchaikovsky's range was wide, from light salon pieces to large-scale symphonies, and melody is almost always in the foreground — sometimes Western in style, sometimes in the manner of Russian folk song, and occasionally an actual folk tune. It was his generous gift for melody that made his music instantly recognisable and loved by audiences around the world.
The site offers several piano pieces by Tchaikovsky that make a good starting point: Morning Prayer, March of the Wooden Soldiers and Old French Song (Op. 39); The Seasons: January, The Seasons: February and the more demanding The Seasons: August (Op. 37); and the more demanding Doumka (Op. 59). They are arranged by increasing difficulty, from intermediate to advanced, and suit players just starting to explore Tchaikovsky's style.
Tchaikovsky also worked as a conductor, teacher and critic, but he is remembered above all as a composer — a leading figure of musical Romanticism and a subtle lyricist who explored the complex and contradictory feelings of human life. His works, alongside the music of The Five, marked a new stage in the development of Russian music.