Titans of History

TCHAIKOVSKY

1840–1893

Truly there would be reason to go mad were it not for music.

Tchaikovsky, on the fundamental importance of music to his existence

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is one of the most enduringly popular composers in the Western tradition, whose symphonies and concertos have been recorded more often than those of any other composer, and whose ballet scores are among the most famous in the world.

While weathering the strains of an intensely difficult personal life, Tchaikovsky rejected the folk-based styles of other Russian composers of his age to create soaring, sweeping and heart-breakingly poignant romantic works that contrast vividly with the brilliant but bleak operas of Wagner or the impassioned restraint of Brahms. From the “Romeo and Juliet” Overture and Swan Lake to the “1812” Overture and his great opera Eugene Onegin, Tchaikovsky’s music is as widely loved today as when it was written.

Like Beethoven and Mozart, Tchaikovsky showed early musical talent. He played the piano from the age of five and composed songs for his siblings, as well as reading and writing in French and German. His father was a mining engineer—comfortable but not wealthy—and the young Tchaikovsky was marked down for a career in law, attending the St. Petersburg Imperial School of Jurisprudence from the ages of twelve to nineteen, then going straight into a civil service job at the ministry of justice. As he grew older, his talent for music grew ever more evident. He enrolled at the new St. Petersburg Conservatory of Music in 1862 (resigning his job the next year) and, after maturing astonishingly quickly, left in 1865, already a fully developed musical personality. The following year he moved to Moscow, where he taught musical theory at the Russian Musical Society.

By 1870 Tchaikovsky had produced his first great work, the concert overture “Romeo and Juliet.” It passed almost unnoticed when it premiered in Moscow but had more success in an 1872 revised version in St. Petersburg. It was an abstract orchestral work that nevertheless told a story—one perfectly suited to Tchaikovsky’s tragic and passionate temperament. His life had been affected by tragedy since 1854, when his beloved mother had died of cholera. He later wrote, “I have attempted with love to express both the agony and also the bliss.”

In love lay Tchaikovsky’s personal agony. From the late 1860s he was passionately involved with several young male students, and one of his favorites, Edouard Zak, killed himself in 1873. This had a profound effect on Tchaikovsky. A few years later, perhaps in an attempt to purge himself of homosexual tendencies but more likely to avoid gossip and scandal, he married an obsessive ex-student, Antonina Miliukova. She had plagued him with letters and threatened to kill herself if he did not return her affection. Despite clear warning signs that it was a completely inappropriate match, Tchaikovsky proposed to her in May 1877 and wed her in July that year. By September the marriage was over in all but name.

Despite this tumultuous period in his romantic life, Tchaikovsky was in fluent composing vein. He produced the ballet score Swan Lake in 1875–6. In 1877–8 he composed his outstanding Fourth Symphony and his greatest opera, Eugene Onegin, a musical interpretation of Pushkin’s famous verse story. At first Onegin was not well received, but as time passed it came to be recognized as an operatic masterpiece—and when the piano score was published it sold in hatfuls. A lifelong Francophile, Tchaikovsky’s music shows the clarity and lightness of French models rather than the more somber and introverted tones of his German contemporaries.

With his marriage over, Tchaikovsky entered another important phase of his life: his relationship with the wealthy philanthropist Nadezhda von Meck. Though the pair never properly met, she bankrolled his career with an annual salary of 6000 rubles. This allowed him to quit his job and devote his life to composing. Meck supported him from 1876 until her abrupt severance of links in 1890, the period when Tchaikovsky composed some of his most famous works. In 1880 he wrote his overture “1812,” with its bombastic finale that includes sixteen cannon and the ringing of church bells. It premiered in Moscow two years later. By this time Tchaikovsky’s fame was beginning to peak. He was commissioned to write the Coronation March for Tsar Alexander III in 1883, and his presence as a conductor was sought across Europe.

He wrote his Fifth Symphony in 1888 and followed this with two ballets—The Sleeping Beauty, completed in 1889, and The Nutcracker, completed in 1892. He also composed an opera, The Queen of Spades, unveiled in Moscow in 1890. All these works benefited from a more stable emotional environment, the lack of financial worries, and a strict work regime. By this time his fame had spread to America, where he was asked to conduct his Coronation March at the opening concert in New York’s Carnegie Hall.

Like his mother, Tchaikovsky most probably died from cholera, contracted from drinking contaminated water in a St. Petersburg restaurant in October 1893. It was just days after the premiere of perhaps his most outstanding and tragic work, the Sixth Symphony, the “Pathétique.” Requiem services and tributes were held throughout Russia in his memory. He created a passionate, highly charged, intensely emotional musical world, which still has an immediate appeal to listeners everywhere.