Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

• 1. Introduction

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  Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky once listened to a playback of his own voice on an Edison recording device and said: "This trill could be better." That was January 1890, in Moscow, and the remark captures something essential about the man: even caught off guard, hearing his own voice played back at him, he was thinking about craft. He was also deeply reluctant to be there at all. When asked to play something on the piano or at least speak a few words, he refused. "I am a bad pianist and my voice is raspy," he told the man who invited him. "Why should one eternalize it?"

  The question hangs in the air, because Tchaikovsky did eternalize himself, more than almost any composer of the 19th century. His music for Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and The Sleeping Beauty has never left the stage. The 1812 Overture, which he composed in roughly six weeks and privately dismissed as lacking artistic merit, became for millions of listeners the piece by Tchaikovsky they know best. His First Piano Concerto, his Violin Concerto, his symphonies, his opera Eugene Onegin: the list of works that entered the permanent classical repertoire is extraordinary for a man who was not even supposed to become a musician.

  He was born on the 7th of May 1840 in Votkinsk, a small town in the Vyatka Governorate of the Russian Empire, in what is now Udmurtia, near the banks of the Kama River. His father was an engineer and lieutenant colonel who managed the Ironworks at Kamsko-Votkinsk. His family sent him at the age of ten to the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in Saint Petersburg, 800 miles from home, to prepare for a civil service career. The musical profession in Russia at the time ranked, socially, no higher than that of a peasant.

  How a boy who was supposed to become a government clerk became the first Russian composer whose music made a lasting impression internationally is a story about talent colliding with institutional prejudice, about a country unsure of its own identity, and about a man who spent his entire life trying to reconcile two musical worlds that were never quite meant to fit together.

• 2. A Family Shaped by Distance

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  Fanny Dürbach, a 22-year-old French governess hired by the family in 1844, was the first person to recognize that the four-and-a-half-year-old Tchaikovsky was extraordinary. He was initially thought too young to study alongside his older brother Nikolai and a niece, but his insistence changed her mind. Within two years of beginning his studies he was fluent in French and German. Dürbach kept many of his early compositions and became the source of several childhood anecdotes; she also, according to those who knew the family, provided the warmth and affection that his mother Alexandra sometimes failed to offer.

  His mother was eighteen years younger than his father Ilya and was of French and German ethnicity on her paternal side. Descriptions of her range from cold and emotionally distant to deeply devoted, and the tension between those accounts was never resolved. What is not disputed is the effect of her death. Alexandra died of cholera in 1854, when Tchaikovsky was fourteen. He was already at boarding school in Saint Petersburg, already 800 miles from everyone he knew, and the loss, far from being softened by distance, left emotional damage that persisted for the rest of his life.

  His father, who had also contracted cholera but survived, sent him back to school immediately after the death, hoping that classwork would keep the boy occupied. It did not suppress the grief, but it did prompt Tchaikovsky to compose for the first time with any seriousness: a waltz written in his mother's memory. School friendships from this period, including those with Aleksey Apukhtin and Vladimir Gerard, became lifelong. Gerard would later recall the young Tchaikovsky improvising on the school's harmonium, and say: "We were amused, but not imbued with any expectations of his future glory".

  The family structure that gave Tchaikovsky the most stability in adult life came through his sister Alexandra, whose marriage to Lev Davydov produced seven children. That household became the closest thing to a real family home he knew once he left school. One of those seven children, Vladimir Davydov, who went by the nickname Bob, would become central to the final chapter of Tchaikovsky's life.

• 3. The Conservatory and The Five

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  On the 10th of June 1859, the 19-year-old Tchaikovsky graduated from the School of Jurisprudence as a titular counselor and was appointed to the Ministry of Justice. He became a junior assistant within six months. He remained a senior assistant for the rest of a three-year civil service career that he had never wanted.

  The Russian Musical Society had been founded that same year, 1859, by Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna and her protégé Anton Rubinstein, to fulfill Tsar Alexander II's wish to foster native musical talent. When Tchaikovsky enrolled in music theory classes in 1861 at the Mikhailovsky Palace, those classes were a direct precursor to the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, which opened the following year. Tchaikovsky joined its premiere class, studying harmony and counterpoint with Nikolai Zaremba and instrumentation and composition with Rubinstein himself. He graduated in 1865, winning a silver medal for a cantata based on Friedrich Schiller's "Ode to Joy".

  The conservatory's Western-oriented training set Tchaikovsky apart from a rival group of composers who had already staked out a very different position. In 1856, the critic Vladimir Stasov and an eighteen-year-old pianist named Mily Balakirev had agreed on a nationalist agenda for Russian music. They took the operas of Mikhail Glinka as their model, incorporated folk music, rejected Western harmonic practices, and viewed conservatories as actively harmful to native talent. The group that coalesced around Balakirev, Cui, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov and Borodin became known as the moguchaya kuchka, or The Five.

  Tchaikovsky's relationship with The Five was complicated but not hostile. In 1869, he and Balakirev worked together on what became the fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet, a work the group embraced wholeheartedly. They also welcomed his Second Symphony, later nicknamed the Little Russian. Despite that support, Tchaikovsky worked deliberately to maintain his independence from The Five and from the conservative faction at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory alike. His goal was a reconciliation, not an allegiance. He believed, and attempted to demonstrate through his compositions, that Russian and Western European musical practices were "intertwined and mutually dependent".

  Rubinstein himself called Tchaikovsky "a composer of genius" in his autobiography, while simultaneously taking issue with the more progressive tendencies in some of his student work. The professional friction showed itself sharply when Tchaikovsky submitted his First Symphony for performance by the Russian Musical Society. Rubinstein and Zaremba refused to consider it unless substantial changes were made. Tchaikovsky complied; they still refused. He withdrew the symphony, and it received its first complete performance in Moscow in February 1868, minus the revisions his former teachers had demanded.

• 4. Patronage and Crisis

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  Nadezhda von Meck, the widow of a railway magnate, entered Tchaikovsky's life not long before his marriage in 1877. What followed became one of the most unusual partnerships in musical history. She became his patroness for thirteen years, providing financial support that allowed him to focus entirely on composition. Tchaikovsky called her his "best friend". They agreed, from the outset, never to meet under any circumstances.

  The marriage that preceded and overlapped with that arrangement was a disaster. At the age of 37, Tchaikovsky wed a former student named Antonina Miliukova. The couple were mismatched psychologically and sexually and lived together for only two and a half months before he left, suffering from acute writer's block and severe emotional distress. He never blamed Antonina for the failure. His family remained supportive throughout the crisis and for the rest of his life. Scholars have suggested the debacle may have forced Tchaikovsky to confront the full truth about his own sexuality.

  During the period after the marriage collapsed, and with Von Meck's patronage securing his income, Tchaikovsky completed Eugene Onegin, orchestrated his Fourth Symphony, and composed the Violin Concerto. He spent the following years traveling incessantly through Europe and rural Russia, largely alone, avoiding social contact. His foreign reputation grew during this time. The novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky's public call for "universal unity" with the West at the unveiling of the Pushkin Monument in Moscow in 1880 helped shift the perception of Tchaikovsky's music inside Russia as well. Before that speech, his music had been considered "overly dependent on the West"; as Dostoevsky's message spread, the stigma lifted.

  The 1812 Overture, composed around this period at Nikolai Rubinstein's suggestion as a commemorative piece, was finished within six weeks. Tchaikovsky wrote to Von Meck that it would be "very loud and noisy" and that he had written it with "no warm feeling of love". He warned the conductor Eduard Napravnik that he would not be offended if the work was found unsuitable for symphony concerts. The overture went on to become, for many listeners, the most recognizable piece he ever wrote. Rubinstein died in Paris on the 23rd of March 1881. That December, Tchaikovsky began a Piano Trio in A minor, dedicated to the memory of a great artist. First performed privately at the Moscow Conservatory on the first anniversary of Rubinstein's death, the piece would later be played at memorial concerts for Tchaikovsky himself, in November 1893.

• 5. Official Recognition and Conducting

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  In March 1884, Emperor Alexander III conferred on Tchaikovsky the Order of Saint Vladimir, fourth class, which carried with it a title of hereditary nobility and a personal audience with the Tsar. The gesture amounted to official state approval of a composer who had spent decades working outside official favor.

  Alexander III pushed further in 1885, requesting a new production of Eugene Onegin at the Bolshoi Kamenny Theatre in Saint Petersburg rather than the Mariinsky Theatre. The choice carried a deliberate message: Tchaikovsky's music was replacing Italian opera as the official imperial art. At the instigation of Ivan Vsevolozhsky, Director of the Imperial Theaters, Tchaikovsky was awarded a lifetime annual pension of 3,000 rubles from the Tsar, making him the premier court composer in practice if not in title.

  Despite a lifelong aversion to public life, Tchaikovsky began, in his later years, to participate in it. He served as director of the Moscow branch of the Russian Musical Society during the 1889-1890 season, using the position to invite international figures to conduct, including Brahms, Antonin Dvorak, and Jules Massenet. He had begun conducting his own works in January 1887, substituting at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow on short notice for performances of his opera Cherevichki. Within a year he was in considerable demand throughout Europe and Russia, and the experience helped him overcome a stage fright that had dogged him for his entire career.

  In 1888, he led the premiere of his Fifth Symphony in Saint Petersburg, repeating the work a week later alongside the first performance of his tone poem Hamlet. Cesar Cui dismissed the Fifth Symphony as "routine" and "meretricious". Audiences greeted both works with extreme enthusiasm, and Tchaikovsky conducted the symphony across Russia and Europe. Conducting eventually brought him to the United States in 1891, where he led the New York Music Society's orchestra in his Festival Coronation March at the inaugural concert of Carnegie Hall. In 1892, he was voted a member of the Academie des Beaux-Arts in France, only the second Russian subject to be so honored; the first had been the sculptor Mark Antokolsky. The following year, the University of Cambridge awarded him an honorary Doctor of Music degree.

• 6. The Composer's Craft

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  The American music critic Harold C. Schonberg described Tchaikovsky's melodic gift as a "sweet, inexhaustible, supersensuous fund of melody", and for decades that gift was precisely what his critics held against him. The charge was that melody without rigorous structural development was a sign of compositional shallowness. The charge was not entirely unfair, though it missed something essential about what Tchaikovsky was actually doing.

  The core problem, according to the musicologist David Brown and others, was that Russian melodies were structurally different from Western ones. Where Western themes were designed to develop, to propel music forward through modulation and contrast, Russian melodies were self-contained. They functioned with a mindset of stasis and repetition. Forcing such themes through the machinery of Western sonata form was, in a meaningful sense, asking them to do something they were not built to do.

  Tchaikovsky found his solution while composing the Fourth Symphony. He essentially sidestepped thematic development, keeping sonata form only as an outline. Within that outline, he placed blocks of dissimilar tonal and thematic material alongside one another, with what the musicologist Hans Keller calls "new and violent contrasts" between musical themes, keys, and harmonies. Rather than accumulating momentum through the interaction of themes, as Austro-German symphonies did, the music built through accumulation of contrasting blocks. Brown argues that this took the listener "through a succession of often highly charged sections" that constituted "a radically new kind of symphonic experience".

  Repetition in Tchaikovsky's music, far from being a failure of imagination, was an active compositional tool. By extending the number of repetitions, altering the rhythm or phrasing of a tune, modulating to a new key, or varying the instruments, he could build toward what Brown describes as "an emotional experience of almost unbearable intensity", controlling precisely when the peak and release of that tension would occur. The musicologist Martin Cooper called this a subtle form of musical unification, one that Tchaikovsky brought to a high point of refinement.

  Rimsky-Korsakov regularly directed his students at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory to Tchaikovsky's orchestration as a model, calling it "devoid of all striving after effect" and praising its "healthy, beautiful sonority". Tchaikovsky's expert use of doubling, the practice of having two or more instruments play a melody simultaneously, combined with his ear for unusual instrument combinations, produced what the musicologist Richard Taruskin described as "a generalized orchestral sonority in which the individual timbres of the instruments, being thoroughly mixed, would vanish".

• 7. Death and Contested Legacy

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  On the 6th of November 1893, Tchaikovsky died in Saint Petersburg at the age of 53. He was interred at Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, near the graves of Borodin, Glinka, and Mussorgsky. Rimsky-Korsakov and Balakirev were later buried nearby.

  His death is generally attributed to cholera, contracted by drinking unboiled water at a local restaurant. In the 1980s in Britain, academic debate raised the possibility that the death was intentional, either by poison or by deliberately contracting the disease. The entry on Tchaikovsky in the New Grove Dictionary of Music, written by Roland John Wiley, concluded that "the polemics over Tchaikovsky's death have reached an impasse" and that "we do not know how Tchaikovsky died. We may never find out".

  The debate over his death has been inseparable from the longer debate over his personal life. Biographers have generally agreed that Tchaikovsky was homosexual. Soviet authorities worked to suppress or deny all references to his sexuality, and censorship of his letters on the subject has persisted in Russian government circles, with the former culture minister Vladimir Medinsky among those who have denied it outright. His dedication of the Sixth Symphony to his 21-year-old nephew Vladimir Davydov, and the feelings expressed about Davydov in letters to others, have been cited by scholars as evidence of a romantic attachment. The degree of psychological suffering that his sexuality caused him remains genuinely contested. David Brown suggested he may have felt "tainted within himself", while Alexander Poznansky argued he experienced "no unbearable guilt" and came to see his desires as "an insurmountable and even natural part of his personality".

  The Sixth Symphony, the Pathetique, was dedicated to Davydov and premiered only nine days before Tchaikovsky's death. The Piano Trio in A minor, which had been written in memory of Nikolai Rubinstein, was played at Tchaikovsky's own memorial concerts in Moscow and Saint Petersburg that November. The cultural historian Joseph Horowitz observed that while Tchaikovsky's standing fluctuated among critics, for the public "it never went out of style". Anthony Holden, in his biography, placed the composer's full historical weight in a single sentence: "Twenty years after Tchaikovsky's death, in 1913, Igor Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring erupted onto the musical scene, signaling Russia's arrival into 20th-century music. Between these two very different worlds, Tchaikovsky's music became the sole bridge".