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Music Department. Composer. Writer. IMDbPro Starmeter See rank. Play trailer 2:20. Adventures of Little Herbert in Mushroom Land (2008) 1 Video. 1 Photo. Pyotr (Peter) Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840, in Votkinsk, Vyatka region, Russia. He was the second of six children (five brothers. and one sister).
- Music Department, Composer, Writer
- May 7, 1840
- 2 min
- November 6, 1893
Works. List of compositions. Signature. (in Latin script)(in Cyrillic script) Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky [n 1] ( / tʃaɪˈkɒfski / chy-KOF-skee; [2] 7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893) [n 2] was a Russian composer of the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music would make a lasting impression internationally.
- 6 November 1893 (aged 53), Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire
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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
Song of My Heart (1948, US). Directed by Benjamin Glazer. Screenplay by Benjamin Glazer. Tchaikovsky was played by the Swedish actor Frank Sundström. allmovies.com link IMDB link. Tchaikovsky (1969, Russia) Directed by Igor Talankin. Screenplay by Yuri Nagibin. Tchaikovsky was played by Innokenty Smoktunovsky.
Apr 2, 2014 · Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is widely considered the most popular Russian composer in history. His work includes the 'The Sleeping Beauty' and 'The Nutcracker.' Updated: May 27, 2021
