Piotr Ilitch Tchaïkovski

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on 7 May 1840 at Votkinsk, a small industrial town in the Urals, where his father, Ilya, managed ironworks and mines. His mother, Alexandra, partly of French descent, sang and played the piano. A French governess, Fanny Dürbach, took charge of his education and described him as a very sensitive child whom she called “the porcelain child”. He discovered music through an orchestrion, a mechanical organ playing tunes by Mozart, and began piano at five.

In 1850 the family enrolled him at the School of Jurisprudence in St Petersburg, a boarding school training future civil servants. Separation from his mother was heartbreaking. In 1854 she died of cholera; Tchaikovsky never fully recovered from the loss. In 1859 he became a civil servant at the Ministry of Justice, but he was bored and continued to study music as an amateur.

In 1862 he entered the brand-new St Petersburg Conservatory, founded by the pianist Anton Rubinstein, and left the civil service in 1863 to devote himself entirely to music. In 1866 Nikolai Rubinstein, Anton’s brother, hired him as professor of harmony at the Moscow Conservatory he had just founded. Tchaikovsky taught there for twelve years. He composed his first symphonies, overtures such as Romeo and Juliet (1869) and the Piano Concerto No. 1 (1875), at first rejected by Nikolai Rubinstein and then triumphantly premiered in Boston by Hans von Bülow.

In 1876 he composed his first ballet, Swan Lake, for the Bolshoi in Moscow: the premiere was a failure, and the work only became famous after his death, thanks to new choreography. In 1877 he married a former pupil, Antonina Milyukova, though he knew he could not love her: the marriage turned into a disaster within weeks and plunged him into a serious crisis. That same year began a strange relationship with a wealthy widow, Nadezhda von Meck, who paid him a generous annual allowance on condition that they never meet.

For thirteen years they exchanged more than 1,200 letters in which he confided freely about his life and music. Thanks to this allowance he left the Conservatory and devoted himself to composition. He wrote the opera Eugene Onegin (1879), after Pushkin, the Violin Concerto (1878), the Fourth Symphony, dedicated to “my best friend”, and the 1812 Overture (1880), celebrating the Russian victory over Napoleon with bells and cannon fire.

In the 1880s Tchaikovsky became famous worldwide. He conducted his works across Europe, and in 1891 he was invited to the opening of Carnegie Hall in New York. In 1890 he composed The Sleeping Beauty for the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, choreographed by Marius Petipa, and the opera The Queen of Spades. In 1892 The Nutcracker, based on a tale by Hoffmann, introduced for the first time the celesta, a brand-new instrument he had discovered in Paris, for the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy.

In 1893 he composed his Symphony No. 6, the “Pathétique”, which, contrary to tradition, ends with a slow, despairing movement. He conducted it himself in St Petersburg on 28 October 1893. Nine days later, on 6 November, he died, officially of cholera, perhaps after drinking unboiled water. The circumstances of his death have given rise to many theories. He is buried at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St Petersburg. His ballets remain among the most performed in the world.