Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky: Russia's Greatest Composer and the Romantic Soul of the Orchestra

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840, in Votkinsk, a small mining and metalworking town in the Ural region of the Russian Empire, and died on November 6, 1893, in Saint Petersburg, just nine days after the premiere of his Sixth Symphony. In those fifty-three years, he became the most celebrated Russian composer of the nineteenth century and one of the most beloved composers in the entire history of Western music — a man whose Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, the 1812 Overture, and the First Piano Concerto are known to virtually every person who has ever attended a concert, watched a ballet, or heard classical music on the radio. His was a career of extraordinary achievement and painful personal struggle, in which the music he composed served simultaneously as his greatest gift to the world and his primary means of coping with a life he found deeply difficult.

The emotional intensity of Tchaikovsky's music is its most immediately recognizable quality. Where Brahms restrained and the classical tradition disciplined, Tchaikovsky gave way — to passion, to melancholy, to an almost unbearable tenderness, to the kind of overwhelming emotion that critics of his own time sometimes found excessive and that audiences of his own time and every time since have found irresistible. He was a Romantic composer in the deepest sense: a man who believed that music's primary function was the expression of inner life, and who possessed the technical mastery and the emotional depth to fulfill that function with extraordinary power.

His life was complicated by his homosexuality in an era and a society that regarded it as criminal. The tension between his private desires and the requirements of respectability shaped virtually everything: his disastrous marriage, his periods of depression and near-suicidal despair, his grateful dependence on the patronage of Nadezhda von Meck (a wealthy widow who supported him financially for thirteen years but maintained the bizarre condition that they must never meet in person), and the way he threw himself into composition as the one place where he could be most fully himself. The mystery that still surrounds his death — whether it was cholera, as officially recorded, or suicide by poison, as some historians believe — adds a final ambiguity to a life that was never free of it.

Russia and the Musical World Tchaikovsky Inherited

The Russia into which Tchaikovsky was born in 1840 was a vast empire in the midst of contradictory transformation — modernizing and westernizing under the pressure of European example while simultaneously discovering and celebrating its own national identity in language, literature, art, and music. The tension between these impulses — the Western and the Russian, the European and the national — would define the central debate of Russian musical culture throughout Tchaikovsky's career and would shape his own aesthetic choices in ways both conscious and unconscious.

Russian art music as a self-conscious tradition barely existed before the nineteenth century. Folk songs and Orthodox church music were ancient and deeply rooted, but the institutions of Western-style concert music — the symphony orchestra, the opera house, the conservatory — were recent imports, established primarily through the efforts of the imperial family and the aristocracy who had absorbed Western culture and wanted Western musical entertainment. The Saint Petersburg opera had been founded in the eighteenth century, but it was dominated by Italian composers and performers; the Russian Musical Society, which eventually established the conservatories in Saint Petersburg and Moscow, was founded only in 1859.

Into this emerging musical culture, Tchaikovsky arrived as one of the first trained graduates of a Russian conservatory. His entry into the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1862 — at the age of twenty-two, giving up a government position to do so — was an act of genuine intellectual courage, since the conservatory was still new and its social prestige uncertain. He graduated in 1865 and was almost immediately appointed to the faculty of the newly opened Moscow Conservatory, where he would teach for twelve years while composing the works that established his reputation.