Peter Il'yich Tchaikovsky - Biography
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7th 1840 in Votkinsk Russia 1840 and died in St. Petersburg November 6th 1893. He was the son of a mining inspector Ilya Petrovtch ,his mother Alexandra was of partial French heritage. Tchaikovsky was a member of the Russian upper middle class acquired a governess at age three received piano lessons at five not as a budding musician but an expected accruement of the gentry. Tchaikovsky was evidently a gentle child with an emotionally fragile nature and was devastated when his parents sent him off to the School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg at twelve to prepare for a career as a civil servant. Two years later his mother was to die of cholera which would claim his life nearly forty years later. Her death was to precipitate the first of a series of emotional breakdowns that was to plague him periodically for the balance of his life. Tchaikovsky while at the institute attended the opera in St. Petersburg and continued his self education in music; he graduated from the institute and became a lower rank civil servant of the labyrinth like Czarist bureaucracy. It wasn’t until he became twenty one that he began his formal musical education studying theory composition while maintaining his civil service post. This was not unusual for Russia at the time didn’t have a strong musical establishment, most professional musicians were foreigners. Tchaikovsky’s always felt the lack of a firm musical education caused weaknesses in his technical armor. He was to become the student of the famed pedagogue and pianist Nicholas Rubinstein the brother of world famed pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein. The Western European outlook of his training was to set him against the more powerful current of Russian music the Mighty Five led by composer and theorist Balakerev and his students all amateurs, Borodin, a chemist, Rimsky-Korsakov, naval officer, Mussorgsky, civil servant, Cui an army officer. The group beloved the future of Russian music was to come from the music of the Russian people and that European models and even formal training had a harmful effect on creating a national school. His father was at first against his son becoming a composer but eventually offered him financial support.
Tchaikovsky in his mid twenties began composing in earnest, some songs, piano pieces and First Symphony Winter Dreams. These are hardly masterpieces but works of charm and promise. Tchaikovsky as his correspondence and diaries intimate was exclusively gay from an early age this didn’t preclude platonic emotional relationships with women the first of which was a Belgian soprano Desiree Artot with whom he contemplated marriage, she wisely refused. He tried his hand at opera Voyevoda and a symphonic poem Fatum both of which were destroyed but were reconstructed after his death from sketches. His first great work was the Overture Fantasy Romeo and Juliet (though the piece we know today is a thorough revision of twelve years later). Tchaikovsky in the next few years composed his most famous song None but the Lonely Heart, a Second Symphony Little Russian (revised 1880), symphonic poem Tempest and the First String Quartet with the famed Andante Cantabile. Tchaikovsky accepted a position at the Moscow Conservatory run by his teacher and friend Nicholas Rubinstein. Tchaikovsky and Rubinstein were to have a dramatic but temporary break when the latter judged that the most celebrated of concertos Piano Concerto #1 in B flat minor was unplayable. Curiously the world premiere of this work occurred in Boston in 1875 played by the famed Hans von Bulow. Tchaikovsky during this time visited Paris and was entranced by Delibes ballets and Bizet’s Carmen. The influence of French Music was to be seen in his next celebrated work the ballet Swan Lake (the next year he visited the opening of Wagner’s Festival House in Bayreuth but found Das Ring despite impressive pages a bore. Two women were now to take a melodramatic part in his life. The first was the wealthy widow of a railroad magnate Nadezhda von Meck who was an admirer of his music and was to become a patron of his for the next fourteen years giving him a generous stipend and during the period continued a long and intimate correspondence wherein Tchaikovsky gives his view of his art, philosophy and society. The amazing aspect of this friendship they mutually agreed never to meet even though they sometimes lived in the same city and went to the same events.
The second relationship was to result in a semi comic catastrophe. Tchaikovsky in 1877 was in the midst of composing his great opera Eugene Onegin based on the Pushkin verse play. He was deeply attached to the heroine of the opera Tatiana who was rejected by the anti hero Onegin. During this period a somewhat unstable student of his Antonina Milyukova declared his love for him. The sensitive composer under the influence of his opera and flattered by the young ladies infatuation agreed to marriage. Tchaikovsky realized that as a now celebrated person his active gay life style was a danger to his career and felt platonic marriage would protect him from scrutiny. His wife not realizing her husband’s orientation aggressively tried to have the marriage consummated repulsed he had a total mental collapse and tried ending his life by walking into the Moskva River he was fished out and one of his brothers a lawyer arranged a separation and settlement. Antonina lived till the 1920’s and was eventually committed to mental hospital when she lost her reason
Luckily these traumas didn’t affect his work because within a year he wrote three of his finest works, symphonic poem Francesca Rimini, Symphony # 4 in F minor, and his sole Violin Concerto. The 1880’s were a period of relative tranquility for Tchaikovsky Madame von Meck’s funds along with his increasing fame allowed him to stay in Western Europe for long periods of time particularly Italy which he loved. The love for Italy is expressed in three works from this period the Serenade for Strings, Capriccio Italien, and later the Sextet Souvenir of Florence. The early and mid 1880’s saw the creation of the Four Orchestral Suites, Piano Concerto # 2 ,Piano Trio Dedicated to the memory of Nicholas Rubinstein, the operas Mazepa, Enchantress, Maid of Orleans and most famously the 1812 Overture.
In 1885 Tchaikovsky moved back to Russia on a more permanent basis. Tchaikovsky first masterpiece from this period was the dramatic symphony Manfred based on Byron’s epic poem Manfred, soon to follow were the great Fifth Symphony in E minor, the beloved ballet Sleeping Beauty and the deeply moving opera Queen of Spades based on a Pushkin short story adapted by his brother Modest. Tchaikovsky developed a modest career as a conductor and toured Europe and even America where he conducted at the opening of Carnegie Hall in 1891.During his travels he developed friendships with Saint-Saens,Grieg ,Dvorak and a tepid one with Brahms whose music he disliked. Madame von Meck in 1890 suddenly and with no explanation broke off communication with Tchaikovsky and revoked his stipend. The financial break was a minor matter for him because he was at this point he was a celebrated and financially well off, but being a ultra sensitive man was cut to the quick by this inexplicable break. Speculation has been that this very conservative woman was made aware of Tchaikovsky homosexuality and broke with him over it. She outlived him by only a year; his name could not be mentioned in her presence.
The following year he wrote the Nutcracker ballet which shared the bill at its premiere with a short opera Iolanthe. In 1893 he received an honorary doctorate at Cambridge and came home to finish the composition of his magnum opus Symphony # 6 in B minor Pathetique. The symphony was uniquely tragic with a long slow, fast opening movement and a lamenting slow finale which concludes very quietly in the darkest and murkiest sounds an orchestra is capable of. The initial performance conducted by Tchaikovsky was not a success; the strangeness of the work confused the audience. A week after the premiere St.Petersburg was having a cholera epidemic and though there was a wide spread warning not to drink un boiled water Tchaikovsky recklessly drank un sterilized water and died a few days later. The alternate story which is not that well substantiated was that he was a having an affair with a young man who was part of the Russian Royal Family, this was discovered and Tchaikovsky was forced to either leave the country or commit suicide by arsenic poisoning, according to this theory the attending physician was part of the plot along with Tchaikovsky’s immediate family. The Pathetique performed shortly after his death became a sensation and was performed all over Europe and America with the whispered titillation that it was a “Suicide Symphony”
Tchaikovsky is a unique case, a composer who is probably the most popular classical composer who ever lived among the general public but one who has engendered great disdain among musical academics and critics. Musicology in many countries including America is German centric in it view point and Tchaikovsky technical weaknesses and his use of lovely melodies wrapped in brilliant orchestration was somehow un healthy the aural equivalent of a ice cream sundae. The general public’s attraction to his music along with Big Band leaders in the 30’s and 40’s appropriating his music they felt proved their point. There were different viewpoints, Igor Stravinsky for one worshiped Tchaikovsky. Through Russian recordings we got to know his operas, Tchaikovsky wrote ten of them. Recordings allowed to his hear the whole of his ballets, not just twenty minute suites. Great conductors like Cantelli, Markevitch and Mravinsky let us hear how potent the symphonies are if you follow Tchaikovsky’s written instructions. I am certain that my choosing Tchaikovsky as a great composer will be looked at with disdain in some quarters. Discounting the fact that this was the first classical music I heard as a boy and first loves die hard, there must be some reward in offering the world so much beauty and sheer excitement.
