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Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky [n 1] ( / tʃaɪˈkɒfski / chy-KOF-skee; [2] 7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893) [n 2] was a Russian composer during the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music would make a lasting impression internationally. Tchaikovsky wrote some of the most popular concert and theatrical music in the current ...
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Tchaikovsky was one of the most famous Russian composers. His music had great appeal for the general public by virtue of its tuneful open-hearted melodies, impressive harmonies, and colourful, picturesque orchestration, all of which evoke a profound emotional response.
What is Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky known 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).
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. Despite being gay, Tchaikovsky married Antonina Milyukova, a young music student, in 1877. He left her after a few weeks.
Where was Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky educated?
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.
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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.
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).
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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.
- Alexander Poznansky
- 1812 Overture. The 1812 Overture (1880), Tchaikovsky’s most famous work, tells the story of Napoleon’s defeat at the hands of the Russian army, via the ‘Marseillaise’ and the ‘Russian Imperial Hymn’, climaxing in a majestic celebration of cannon fire.
- The Nutcracker. No other composer has ever succeeded in capturing the fairy-tale world of childhood innocence as inimitably as Tchaikovsky in this most cherishable of his three great ballet scores.
- Swan Lake. Swan Lake is arguably the greatest of all Romantic ballets and one of Tchaikovsky’s best works. The original version of Swan Lake, premiered by the Bolshoi Ballet in Moscow in 1877, was a failure, and it was not until the 1895 revival, with choreography by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, that the ballet finally won over the Russian public.
- The Sleeping Beauty. The Sleeping Beauty, based on a timeless fairytale, is one of the world’s most beloved ballets. Tchaikovsky’s radiantly inspired music reflected his contented state of mind at the time and he declared, “The subject is so poetical that I got quite carried away while composing it!”
- The Nutcracker. Like Swan Lake before it, The Nutcracker was met with a lukewarm response at its premiere in 1892. Despite this, both are now among the most popular ballets of all time, and The Nutcracker contains so many popular melodies that Tchaikovsky transformed some of his own favourites into the 20-minute Nutcracker Suite which includes Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy, Dance of the Reed Flutes, and Waltz of the Flowers, among others.
- 1812 Overture. Tchaikovsky’s 1812 Overture is a firecracker of a piece – quite literally. Written in 1880, it pays tribute to the Russian army’s defence against Napoleon Bonaparte’s invasion in the year 1812.
- Swan Lake. The first of three ballets written by Tchaikovsky, Swan Lake is one of the most iconic ballets of all time, from the music through to the costume and choreography.
- Symphony No. 5. Tchaikovsky’s fifth symphony was composed in 1888, receiving its premiere in November of that year at the Mariinsky Theatre in Saint Petersburg where it was conducted by the composer himself.
