Historical Figure
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
d. 1893
Russian composer (1840–1893)
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Biography
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was a Russian composer of the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music made a lasting impression internationally. Tchaikovsky wrote some of the most popular concert and theatrical music in the classical repertoire, including the 1812 Overture, his First Piano Concerto, the Violin Concerto, the Romeo and Juliet Overture-Fantasy, several symphonies, the opera Eugene Onegin, and the ballets Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker.
In Their Own Words (5)
This evening I feel sad and am shedding tears because this morning while wandering in the woods I was unable to find a single violet. What an old sniveller I am...!
quoted in Geoffrey Hindley, The Larousse Encyclopedia of Music (1982) , 1982
Fate... hangs over our heads like the sword of Damocles and inexorably distills a slow and deadly venom. One must bend to it and abandon oneself to boundless despair...
quoted in Geoffrey Hindley, The Larousse Encyclopedia of Music (1982) , 1982
After the last notes of Gotterdammerung I felt as though I had been let out of prison.
Quoted in Hans Gal, The Musician's World (1965) , 1965
Just as I was starting on my journey the idea came to me for a new symphony, this time with a program, but a program which will remain an enigma to all— let them guess it who can. It will be called "A Programmatic Symphony" (No. 6). During my trip, while composing in my mind, I frequently shed tears. When I got home I settled down to sketch it, and the work went so furiously that I had the first movement completely ready in less than four days and the remaining movements are already clearly outlined in my head. Half the third movement is already done. There will be much innovation of form in this symphony— and incidentally, the finale will not be a noisy allegro but, on the contrary, a long drawn-out adagio. You can't imagine what bliss I feel, being convinced that my time is not yet passed and I can still work. Perhaps, of course, I'm mistaken, but I don't think so.
Letter to a nephew (late February 1893) , 1893
I played over the music of that scoundrel Brahms. What a giftless bastard! It annoys me that this self-inflated mediocrity is hailed as a genius.
Diary entry for October 9, 1886, quoted in Nicolas Slonimsky, Lexicon of Musical Invective (1953), p. 73. , 1953
Timeline
The story of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, told in moments.
Graduates from the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. He's trained in Western composition methods at a time when Russia's nationalist composers reject them. He'll spend his career trying to fuse the two traditions. Neither side fully trusts him.
Marries Antonina Miliukova. It lasts weeks. He attempts suicide by wading into the Moscow River in October, hoping to catch pneumonia. He doesn't die. That same year, a wealthy widow named Nadezhda von Meck begins funding him on the condition that they never meet. They write thousands of letters instead.
Completes his Fourth Symphony and the opera Eugene Onegin while his personal life crumbles. The symphony's opening brass fanfare represents fate. He dedicates it to "my best friend," von Meck. The first audiences aren't sure what to make of it. Posterity is.
The Nutcracker premieres at the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg. Critics are lukewarm. He considers it inferior to his ballet The Sleeping Beauty. It becomes the most performed ballet in the world.
Dies in St. Petersburg, nine days after premiering his Sixth Symphony, the Pathetique. Official cause: cholera from drinking unboiled water. Rumors of forced suicide circulate for over a century. He'd dedicated the symphony to his nephew Vladimir Davydov. The final movement ends quietly, in the dark. Audiences at the premiere didn't know whether to clap.
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