Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky

Russian composer

• Born: May 7, 1840
• Birthplace: Votkinsk, Vyatka province, Russia
• Died: November 6, 1893
• Place of death: St. Petersburg, Russia

Tchaikovsky has remained one of the most popular Western composers since his death. His soaring melodies, expressive supporting harmonies, and lush orchestration have made his concertos and later symphonies the epitome of late Romantic musical opulence.

Early Life

The son of a mining engineer, Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky (chi-KAHF-skee) received a good education as a child through his French governess, Fanny Dürbach, and his piano teacher, Mariya Palchikova. In 1848, his father retired and moved to St. Petersburg, where Tchaikovsky entered the preparatory program of the School of Jurisprudence in 1850, graduating nine years later. His mother, from whom he inherited his sensitivity, died in 1854. Tchaikovsky remained close to his father and siblings, five brothers and a sister, especially to his younger twin brothers, Anatoly and Modest.

Tchaikovsky accepted a position as a clerk in the Ministry of Justice in 1859, and in 1861 he began studies at the Russian Musical Society, which was transformed into the St. Petersburg Conservatory in 1862 under Anton Rubinstein. Tchaikovsky resigned his government position in the following year to become a full-time student at the conservatory, studying composition and orchestration with Rubinstein. He was graduated, with a silver medal in composition, in 1865. In the following year, he began his duties as a teacher of harmony at the newly founded conservatory in Moscow, headed by Anton Rubinstein’s brother Nikolay.

Life’s Work

Tchaikovsky’s musical development was late in comparison with that of such composers as Ludwig van Beethoven, Franz Schubert, Robert Schumann, or Frédéric Chopin: The main compositions from his twenties are the song “None but the Lonely Heart,” which contains the quintessential Tchaikovskyan melody in accompaniment to a text written by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and the uneven First Symphony in G Minor, subtitled Winter Daydreams. The first version of Romeo and Juliet , a fantasy overture based on William Shakespeare’s tragedy, was finished in 1869, although the final version was not completed until 1880; this is the first of his orchestral works to be part of the standard repertory.

The works of Tchaikovsky’s thirties include the second, third, and fourth symphonies; three string quartets (the first contains the famous “Andante cantabile,” based on a Ukrainian folk song that Tchaikovsky collected on a summer holiday in Kamenka in 1865); the first piano concerto (the introduction to the first movement is perhaps Tchaikovsky’s best-known melody); and a violin concerto. The piano concerto received its premiere in the United States. Also from these years is his finest opera, Yevgeny Onyegin (Eugene Onegin), based on the poem by Alexander Pushkin; it is a psychological drama rather than a grand opera or mythological drama and showed that there was an alternative path to Richard Wagner’s music dramas in the serious musical theater. Other major works include his orchestral fantasy Francesca da Rimini and the ballet Swan Lake .

The 1870’s were the years in which Tchaikovsky began to establish his international musical reputation, but they were tragic for him personally. In 1868, he met the Belgian soprano Désirée Artôt, four years his senior, and began a courtship that was terminated first by his doubts about marriage and then by her sudden marriage to another singer in the touring opera company of which she was a member. In 1877, he married Antonina Milyukova, a young woman whom he scarcely knew; biographers have speculated that his real reason for his marriage was to quiet the rumors of homosexuality, which may have been manifested during his student days at the School of Jurisprudence. The marriage to Milyukova was a disaster, never consummated, and it eventually ended in divorce in 1881 after she bore another man’s illegitimate child.

Further rumors about homosexual affairs at the Moscow Conservatory may have caused Tchaikovsky to resign his professorship there at the end of 1878. A more likely explanation is that Tchaikovsky came increasingly to resent the demands that teaching made on the time he wished to devote to composition. The advent of a mysterious patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, who provided him with a generous subsidy on the condition that they never meet (although they exchanged a voluminous correspondence), gave Tchaikovsky financial independence for twelve years.

The six years afterward were less productive ones for the composer. The main works of this relatively fallow period were the opera Orleanskaya Dyeva , after Friedrich Schiller’s drama Die Jungfrau von Orleans (1801; The Maid of Orleans, 1835), a fanciful historical drama about Joan of Arc; the Piano Trio in A Minor, an elegy for Nikolay Rubinstein; and the serenade for string orchestra.

Tchaikovsky was not a member of the circle of composers around Mily Alekseyevich Balakirev, the Moguchkaya Kuchka (mighty handful), which included Modest Mussorgsky and Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov, but he did receive advice from Balakirev on Romeo and Juliet and on the work marking Tchaikovsky’s creative renewal, the program symphony Manfred , based on a poem by George Gordon, Lord Byron, featuring the wanderings and unfulfilled love of an alienated outsider.

Tchaikovsky finished the work in 1885; it belongs to that small group of literary program symphonies that includes Hector Berlioz’s Symphonie fantastique and Harold in Italy and Franz Liszt’s Faust Symphony. The four movements depict, respectively, Manfred’s wanderings and his memories of his beloved Astarte; Manfred’s encounter with the witch of the Alps; a pastoral slow movement where Manfred encounters the inhabitants of the Swiss mountains; and a final movement first depicting the court of the demon Ahriman, then featuring Manfred’s forgiveness by Astarte and his peaceful death. The work is Tchaikovsky’s orchestral masterpiece, but it is not performed frequently because of its length and technical difficulty.

Among the other works marking Tchaikovsky’s creative renewal are the Fifth Symphony, his most popular work, in which he follows the technique of Manfred in having a “motto theme” appear in all four movements of the work in various transformations; the pleasant string sextet “Souvenir of Florence”; and his other major opera, Pikovaya dama (The Queen of Spades ), based on a story by Alexander Pushkin as adapted by Tchaikovsky’s brother Modest. Despite its macabre topic, the opera has been one of Tchaikovsky’s most popular.

Tchaikovsky’s last few years were marked by outward success and constant travel, but deep inner conflicts. He was the first major European composer to visit the United States, conducting his music in April and May of 1891 (especially the first piano concerto) in New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia and visiting Washington, D.C., and Niagara Falls. He was pleased at the acclaim and hospitality he received, but he was torn with homesickness for Russia.

During the following year, Tchaikovsky received an honorary doctor of music degree from the University of Cambridge in England. His outward honors were canceled in his mind by fits of despair, fears that his creativity was exhausted and that he was repeating himself musically, and compulsive travel marked by spells of homesickness during which he would cancel concerts to return to Russia. His two main last works, however, reveal the disparity in his creative impulses: The Sixth Symphony (called, after his death, the Pathétique by his brother Modest), with its unusual form, ends with a despairing slow movement; while the ballet Shchelkunchik (The Nutcracker , based on a tale by E. T. A. Hoffmann), has delighted children at Christmas for decades—the suite extracted from the ballet is Tchaikovsky’s most frequently performed composition.

The circumstances of Tchaikovsky’s death in November, 1893, shortly after the first performance of the Sixth Symphony, are still a matter of controversy. The traditional account is that either by accident or by design (if one accepts the “suicidal” thoughts expressed in the last movement of the Sixth Symphony) he drank a glass of unboiled water during a cholera epidemic in St. Petersburg in late 1893. Alexandra Orlova brought to the West the story that she had heard from an elderly member of the Russian Museum staff, who claimed that the drink was actually poison and was taken to escape the possibility of a scandal brought on by a homosexual encounter. More recently a less lurid theory has been advanced: Tchaikovsky did ingest contaminated food or water during the cholera epidemic, but his doctor misdiagnosed his ailment until it was too late to institute a regimen of proper treatment.

Significance

Tchaikovsky composed effectively in virtually every musical genre of the late nineteenth century: symphony, opera, ballet, art song, concerto, chamber music, and even church music (his Russian Orthodox Church music, especially the Vespers of 1882, includes some of the finest examples of the genre), though his solo piano music is the least effective of his works. He worshiped Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart’s music and esteemed his French contemporaries—such as Georges Bizet, Léo Delibes, and Camille Saint-Saëns—over such German composers as Richard Wagner and Johannes Brahms, whose music he particularly disliked (Brahms reciprocated this feeling).

Tchaikovsky’s musical development is more comparable to the spiral (as his brother Modest suggested) than to the straight-line development of a Beethoven or Schubert. Particularly striking elements of his style are his soaring melodies, his effective use of the orchestra, his rich supporting harmony (which in many respects recalls the devices of Liszt), and his experiments with musical form. Though not particularly close to the Russian nationalist composers, he could use Russian folk songs as effectively as any of them, as best seen in the finale of his Second Symphony.

Tchaikovsky’s extensive travels in the West and his formal training in Western compositional techniques at the St. Petersburg Conservatory have given rise to the mistaken idea that he was Western rather than Russian in his musical orientation, yet he considered himself Russian above all, and he is still honored as a national treasure in the Soviet Union. Tchaikovsky has been faulted by critics for his piling of climax upon climax in an almost frenzied and hysterical manner (the development section of the first movement of the Fourth Symphony, for example), his compositional technique of seeming to stitch blocks of music together, and an almost blatant vulgarity (the finale of the Fifth Symphony), but Beethoven, Giuseppe Verdi, and Gustav Mahler similarly have been accused of vulgarity.

Tchaikovsky set the standard for the large-scale epic symphony, bravura concerto, and dramatic ballet among Russian and Soviet composers, and he is often the composer through whom many young persons are first attracted to art music. He remains one of the few composers for whom programs devoted entirely to his music attract a sizable audience. His popularity among the general musical audience shows no sign of waning, and recent critical studies have elevated his stature to that of one of the major composers of the late nineteenth century.

Bibliography

Abraham, Gerald, ed. The Music of Tchaikovsky. New York: W. W. Norton, 1946. A series of ten essays by specialists on various aspects of Tchaikovsky’s life and work. Edward Lockspeiser’s account of “Tchaikovsky the Man” is of special interest for the general reader, though all the essays are oriented more toward music lovers than musical scholars.

Brown, David. “Pyotr II’yich Tchaikovsky.” In Russian Masters 1: Glinka, Borodin, Balakirev, Musorgsky, Tchaikovsky. New York: W. W. Norton, 1986. The entry is essentially Brown’s article on Tchaikovsky’s life and works in The New Grove dictionary with additions. The article provides the best short survey of the composer’s life and works, though it is flawed by the author’s uncritical acceptance of a lurid account of Tchaikovsky’s suicide. The list of works and bibliography are especially complete.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Tchaikovsky. 4 vols. New York: Norton, 1978-1992. The most complete account of the composer’s life, with critical analyses of his musical works. Brown provides a meticulously detailed narrative of Tchaikovsky’s life and musical development; he concludes that the composer killed himself rather than reveal his homosexuality.

Holden, Anthony. Tchaikovsky: A Biography. New York: Random House, 1995. Good introduction to Tchaikovsky’s life, placing more emphasis on his homosexuality than some previous accounts. Holden argues the composer lived in fear of being “outed” as a homosexual and committed suicide to keep his sexual orientation a secret.

Kearney, Leslie, ed. Tchaikovsky and His World. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1998. Collection of scholarly essays examining Tchaikovsky’s life and work, including a discussion of how his homosexuality affected his music and excerpts of his letters to his brothers.

Poznansky, Alexander. Tchaikovsky’s Last Days: A Documentary Study. New York: Oxford University Press, 1996. Examines the last twenty days of the composer’s life, refuting the view of Holden (see above) and other biographers who maintain Tchaikovsky committed suicide rather than be “outed” as a homosexual.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗, ed. Tchaikovsky Through Others’ Eyes, Compiled, edited, and with an introduction by Alexander Poznansky. Translations from Russian by Ralph C. Burr, Jr., and Robert Bird. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999. Collection of memoirs, diary entries, and interviews written and conducted by Tchaikovsky’s contemporaries, detailing the public and private lives of the composer.

Wiley, Roland John. Tchaikovsky’s Ballets. New York: Oxford University Press, 1985. This study examines the music of Tchaikovsky’s three grand ballets—Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker—and also investigates the circumstances surrounding their composition, their original and subsequent productions, and their audiences.

Yoffe, Elkhonon, ed. Tchaikovsky in America: The Composer’s Visit in 1891. Translated by Lidya Yoffe. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986. Copious excerpts from Tchaikovsky’s diaries, correspondence, and news accounts of the time of Tchaikovsky’s visits to New York, Baltimore, and Philadelphia in 1891, and the abortive ventures to bring him to the United States for subsequent tours.