• Born: 7 May 1840
• Birthplace: Votkinsk, Russia
• Died: 6 November 1893
• Best Known As: Russian composer of The Nutcracker

Russian composer Peter (Pyotr) Ilyich Tchaikovsky wrote some of the most-recognized melodies of classical music, and his ballet The Nutcracker endures as a winter holiday favorite. He began composing in St. Petersburg in the 1860s, while studying and teaching music at the Conservatory. By the 1870s he was gaining public notice, and after 1878 he devoted himself to composing full time. Tchaikovsky's expressive melodies and orchestrations made him an audience favorite beyond Russia, and his international travels included an American tour in 1891. Many of his works are part of the canon of classical music of the Romantic era, including the opera Eugene Onegin, the ballet Swan Lake, the overtures Romeo and Juliet and 1812 Overture and his Sixth Symphony, known as Pathétique.

Tchaikovsky had a personal reputation as emotionally fragile. His brief 1877 marriage to a woman he barely knew is now considered an ill-fated attempt to mask his homosexuality, and possibly led to what has been called a nervous breakdown. The issue of his sexuality is also considered by some modern scholars to have played a part in his untimely death. Originally it was held that Tchaikovsky died from cholera, a result of drinking tainted water. Further research a century later led to the suggestion that he may have deliberately poisoned himself, forced to by a "court of honor" as punishment for his relationship with a young male aristocrat.

From 1877 to about 1890 Tchaikovsky received financial support from Nadezhda von Meck, a wealthy widow who admired but did not know him... Cambridge University made him an honorary Doctor of Music in 1893... Transliterations of his name include Petr, Piotr and Peter, and Tschaikowsky and Chaikovsky.

• Period: Romantic (1820-1869)
• Country: Russia
• Genres: Keyboard, Concerto, Orchestral, Vocal, Chamber, Ballet, Symphonic, Choral, Opera

Biography

Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky was the author of some of the most popular themes in all of classical music. He founded no school, struck out no new paths or compositional methods, and sought few innovations in his works. Yet the power and communicative sweep of his best music elevates it to classic status, even if it lacks the formal boldness and harmonic sophistication heard in the compositions of his contemporaries, Wagner and Bruckner. It was Tchaikovsky's unique melodic charm that could, whether in his Piano Concerto No. 1 or in his ballet The Nutcracker or in his tragic last symphony, make the music sound familiar on first hearing.

Tchaikovsky was born into a family of five brothers and one sister. He began taking piano lessons at age four and showed remarkable talent, eventually surpassing his own teacher's abilities. By age nine, he exhibited severe nervous problems, not least because of his overly sensitive nature. The following year, he was sent to St. Petersburg to study at the School of Jurisprudence. The loss of his mother in 1854 dealt a crushing blow to the young Tchaikovsky. In 1859, he took a position in the Ministry of Justice, but longed for a career in music, attending concerts and operas at every opportunity. He finally began study in harmony with Zaremba in 1861, and enrolled at the St. Petersburg Conservatory the following year, eventually studying composition with Anton Rubinstein.

In 1866, the composer relocated to Moscow, accepting a professorship of harmony at the new conservatory, and shortly afterward turned out his First Symphony, suffering, however, a nervous breakdown during its composition. His opera The Voyevoda came in 1867-1868 and he began another, The Oprichnik, in 1870, completing it two years later. Other works were appearing during this time, as well, including the First String Quartet (1871), the Second Symphony (1873), and the ballet Swan Lake (1875).

In 1876, Tchaikovsky traveled to Paris with his brother, Modest, and then visited Bayreuth, where he met Liszt, but was snubbed by Wagner. By 1877, Tchaikovsky was an established composer. This was the year of Swan Lake's premiere and the time he began work on the Fourth Symphony (1877-1878). It was also a time of woe: in July, Tchaikovsky, despite his homosexuality, foolishly married Antonina Ivanovna Milyukova, an obsessed admirer, their disastrous union lasting just months. The composer attempted suicide in the midst of this episode. Near the end of that year, Nadezhda von Meck, a woman he would never meet, became his patron and frequent correspondent.

Further excursions abroad came in the 1880s, along with a spate of successful compositions, including the Serenade for Strings (1881), 1812 Overture (1882), and the Fifth Symphony (1888). In both 1888 and 1889, Tchaikovsky went on successful European tours as a conductor, meeting Brahms, Grieg, Dvorák, Gounod, and other notable musical figures. Sleeping Beauty was premiered in 1890, and The Nutcracker in 1892, both with success.

Throughout Tchaikovsky's last years, he was continually plagued by anxiety and depression. A trip to Paris and the United States followed one dark nervous episode in 1891. Tchaikovsky wrote his Sixth Symphony, "Pathétique," in 1893, and it was successfully premiered in October, that year. The composer died ten days later of cholera, or -- as some now contend -- from drinking poison in accordance with a death sentence conferred on him by his classmates from the School of Jurisprudence, who were fearful of shame on the institution owing to an alleged homosexual episode involving Tchaikovsky. ~ Robert Cummings, All Music Guide

• Born: May 07, 1840
• Died: Nov 06, 1893
• Active: '40s-2000s
• Major Genres: Dance, Drama
• Career Highlights: Fantasia, Dracula, Women in Love
• First Major Screen Credit: Dracula (1931)

Biography

There are approximately 250 films that use the music of supreme melodist Pyotr Tchaikovsky. A surprising majority, some 72 films, quote parts from one of Tchaikovsky's most popular works, Symphony No. 5 in E minor (1888), with its dramatic fanfares, somber moods, and lyrical waltzes. Curiously, these films are concentrated around the World War II and immediate post-war years: One Hundred Men and a Girl (1937), Unseen Guardians (1939), Utopia of Death (1940), American Spoken Here (1940), The Strange Will of Julian Poydras (1941), The Film That Was Lost (1942), Trifles That Win Wars (1943), To My Unborn Son (1943), Don't You Believe It (1943), That's Why I Left You (1943), Grandpa Called It Art (1944), The Seesaw and the Shoes (1945), Our Old Car (1946), and City of Children (1949).

Whether, in Ken Russell's imaginative dramatic biography The Music Lovers (1970), it's the scene of Madame Meck enthralled with Tchaikovsky's Piano Concerto No. 1 or Anton Rubenstein satirizing the same, the splendidly energetic trepak (lively Russian dance) music underscoring the composer at drunken winter play with his boyfriend, the staging of his ballet in the city park, the terrifying image of the cholera "cures," and many other scenes, this film presents arguably the finest match of image, plot, and a generous sampling of this composer's music.

With a few notable exceptions, music from Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake, usually the instantly recognizable introductory theme, has been employed for scenes of suspense, tension, and horror. The theme first enhanced the archaic, gothic beauty of the Bela Lugosi Dracula (1931) and Boris Karloff The Mummy (1932) vehicles, and was soon taken up again in Secret of the Blue Room (1933) and Edgar G. Ulmer's The Black Cat (1934). The theme appears as a camp icon in Ed Wood (1994) and in Welcome to the Dollhouse (1995). The best version of the ballet itself was Matthew Bourne and Peter Mumford's striking and brilliantly original vision produced for television (1996).

The exquisitely animated Disney studio version in Fantasia of selections from the Nutcracker ballet feature waltzing flowers and snowflakes and trepaking creatures tracing lines in imaginary wintery environments. Other quotes occurred in Derek Jarman's emotionally devastating Edward II (1991, Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairy), Fellini's 8 1/2 (1963), the Friz Freleng animation Holiday for Shoestrings (1946) about cobbler elves, and the Tetris string of Japanese animé (1986-1998).

Tchaikovsky's operas Pikovaya dama (Queen of Spades) and Yevgeny Onyegin (Eugene Onegin) have received many productions, with Lenski's Aria included in The Talented Mr. Ripley (1999). The songs "Du Kommst Zurück" ("You've Returned") and "Freudelos und Liebeleer" ("Joyless and Empty of Love") appear in Es War eine Rauschende Ballnacht (It Was a Gay Ballnight, 1939). The composer's lovely song "None but the Lonely Heart" is heard in several romance films including Love in Bloom (1935).

Other often quoted works by Tchaikovsky are the passionate Romeo and Juliet Fantasy-Overture, his 1812 Overture, Piano Concerto No. 1, the Symphony No. 6 Pathetique, parts of Sleeping Beauty, and the Violin Concerto. ~ "Blue" Gene Tyranny, All Movie Guide

Notre Musique Buy this Movie	Russian Ark Buy this Movie	Eugene Onegin Buy this Movie	Swan Lake Buy this Movie
Nutcracker on Ice Buy this Movie	Shakespeare Dance Trilogy: Stars of the Kirov Ballet Buy this Movie	George Balanchine's The Nutcracker Buy this Movie	The Nutcracker Buy this Movie

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(b Kamsko-Votkinsk, 7 May 1840; d St Petersburg, 6 Nov 1893). Russian composer. His father was a mine inspector. He started piano studies at five and soon showed remarkable gifts; his childhood was also affected by an abnormal sensitivity. At ten he was sent to the School of Jurisprudence at St Petersburg, where the family lived for some time. His parting from his mother was painful; further, she died when he was 14 - an event that may have stimulated him to compose. At 19 he took a post at the Ministry of Justice, where he remained for four years despite a long journey to western Europe and increasing involvement in music. In 1863 he entered the Conservatory, also undertaking private teaching. Three years later he moved to Moscow with a professorship of harmony at the new conservatory. Little of his music so far had pleased the conservative musical establishment or the more nationalist group, but his First Symphony had a good public reception when heard in Moscow in 1868.

Rather less successful was his first opera, The Voyevoda, given at the Bol′shoy in Moscow in1869; Tchaikovsky later abandoned it and re-used material from it in his next, The Oprichnik. A severe critic was Balakirev, who suggested that he wrote a work on Romeo and Juliet: this was the Fantasy-Overture, several times rewritten to meet Balakirev's criticisms; Tchaikovsky's tendency to juxtapose blocks of material rather than provide organic transitions serves better in this programmatic piece than in a symphony as each theme stands for a character in the drama. Its expressive, well-defined themes and their vigorous treatment produced the first of his works in the regular repertory.

The Oprichnik won some success at St Petersburg in 1874, by when Tchaikovsky had won acclaim with his Second Symphony (which incorporates Ukrainian folktunes); he had also composed two string quartets (the first the source of the famous Andante cantabile), most of his next opera, Vakula the Smith, and of his First Piano Concerto, where contrasts of the heroic and the lyrical, between soloist and orchestra, clearly fired him. Originally intended for Nikolay Rubinstein, the head of Moscow Conservatory, who had much encouraged Tchaikovsky, it was dedicated to Hans von Bülow (who gave its première, in Boston) when Rubinstein rejected it as ill-composed and unplayable (he later recanted and became a distinguished interpreter of it). In 1875 came the carefully written Third Symphony and Swan Lake, commissioned by Moscow Opera. The next year a journey west took in Carmen in Paris, a cure at Vichy and the first complete Ring at Bayreuth; although deeply depressed when he reached home - he could not accept his homosexuality - he wrote the fantasia Francesca da Rimini and (an escape into the 18th century) the Rococo Variations for cello and orchestra. Vakula, which had won a competition, had its première that autumn. At the end of the year he was contacted by a wealthy widow, Nadezhda von Meck, who admired his music and was eager to give him financial security; they corresponded intimately for 14 years but never met.

Tchaikovsky, however, saw marriage as a possible solution to his sexual problems; and when contacted by a young woman who admired his music he offered (after first rejecting her) immediate marriage. It was a disaster: he escaped from her almost at once, in a state of nervous collapse, attempted suicide and went abroad. This was however the time of two of his greatest works, the Fourth Symphony and Eugene Onegin. The symphony embodies a ‘fate’ motif that recurs at various points, clarifying the structure; the first movement is one of Tchaikovsky's most individual with its hesitant, melancholy waltz-like main theme and its ingenious and appealing combination of this with the secondary ideas; there is a lyrical, intermezzo-like second movement and an ingenious third in which pizzicato strings play a main role, while the finale is impassioned if loose and melodramatic, with a folk theme pressed into service as second subject. Eugene Onegin, after Pushkin, tells of a girl's rejected approach to a man who fascinates her (the parallel with Tchaikovsky's situation is obvious) and his later remorse: the heroine Tatyana is warmly and appealingly drawn, and Onegin's hauteur is deftly conveyed too, all against a rural Russian setting which incorporates spectacular ball scenes, an ironic background to the private tragedies. The brilliant Violin Concerto also comes from the late 1870s.

The period 1878-84, however, represents a creative trough. He resigned from the conservatory and, tortured by his sexuality, could produce no music of real emotional force (the Piano Trio, written on Rubinstein's death, is a single exception). He spent some time abroad. But in 1884, stimulated by Balakirev, he produced his Manfred symphony, after Byron. He continued to travel widely, and conduct; and he was much honoured. In 1888 the Fifth Symphony, similar in plan to the Fourth (though the motto theme is heard in each movement), was finished; a note of hysteria in the finale was recognized by Tchaikovsky himself. The next three years saw the composition of two ballets, the finely characterized Sleeping Beauty and the more decorative Nutcracker, and the opera The Queen of Spades, with its ingenious atmospheric use of Rococo music (it is set in Catherine the Great's Russia) within a work of high emotional tension. Its theatrical qualities ensured its success when given at St Petersburg in late 1890. The next year Tchaikovsky visited the USA; in 1892 he heard Mahler conduct Eugene Onegin at Hamburg. In 1893 he worked on his Sixth Symphony, to a plan - the first movement was to be concerned with activity and passion; the second, love; the third, disappointment; and the finale, death. It is a profoundly pessimistic work, formally unorthodox, with the finale haunted by descending melodic ideas clothed in anguished harmonies. It was performed on 28 October. He died nine days later: traditionally, and officially, of cholera, but recently verbal evidence has been put forward that he underwent a ‘trial’ from a court of honour from his old school regarding his sexual behaviour and it was decreed that he commit suicide. Which version is true must remain uncertain.

works:
Dramatic music

• The Voyevoda (1869)
• The Oprichnik (1874)
• Vakula the Smith (1876)
• Eugene Onegin (1879)
• The Maid of Orleans (1881)
• Mazeppa (1884)
• The Sorceress (1887)
• The Queen of Spades (1890)
• ballets: Swan Lake (1877)
• The Sleeping Beauty (1890)
• The Nutcracker (1892)
• incidental music

Orchestral music

• Sym. no.1, g, ‘Winter Daydreams’ (1866, rev. 1874)
• Sym. no.2, c, ‘Little Russian’ (1872, rev. 1880)
• Sym. no.3, D, ‘Polish’ (1875)
• Sym. no.4, f (1878)
• Sym. no.5, e (1888)
• Sym. no.6, b, ‘Pathétique’ (1893)
• Manfred, sym. (1885)
• Romeo and Juliet, fantasy ov. (1870, rev. 1880)
• Francesca da Rimini, sym. fantasia (1876)
• 1812, ov. (1880)
• Hamlet, fantasy ov. (1888)
• Pf Conc. no.1, b♭ (1875)
• Pf Conc. no.2, G (1880)
• Pf Conc. no.3, E♭ (1893)
• Vn Conc., D (1878)
• Variations on a Rococo Theme, vc, orch, A (1876)
• Serenade, strs (1880)
• over 20 other works

Chamber and keyboard music

• 3 str qts (1871, 1874, 1877)
• Pf Trio, a (1882)
• Souvenir de Florence, str sextet (1890)
• 12 other chamber works
• Pf Sonata, G (1879)
• over 100 other pf pieces

Vocal music

• c30 choral works, incl. sacred pieces, secular cantatas
• over 100 songs and duets

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Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) is one of the most loved of Russian composers. He epitomized the ingenuous opening to the emotions of the romantic era in music, but his product was made durable through sound craftsmanship and rigorous work habits.

Eschewing the intellectual, Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was in no sense a technical innovator; moreover, he attracted, and still attracts, the barbed clevernesses of those less trustful of emotional statement. But his work is always hotly defended as each generation discovers him afresh - a process considerably quickened by a massive and ever-growing body of literature about his music and his interesting, often tragic life.

Born on May 7, 1840, in Votkinsk in the Vyatka district, Tchaikovsky was the son of a well-to-do engineer. Peter and his brothers and sister received a sound education from their French governesses. He apparently showed no early signs of unusual musical talent but was duly exposed to the music lessons suffered by all young gentlemen. He later recalled growing up in a place "saturated with the miraculous beauty of Russian folk song" and the effect some music had on him as a child - that of exquisite torture so beautiful that he begged the music be stopped. He often referred to this in his letters as a mature artist.

Tchaikovsky attended a school of jurisprudence in St. Petersburg, and, while studying law and government, he also took music lessons, including some composing, from Gabriel Lomakin. Tchaikovsky graduated at the age of 19 and took a job as a bureau clerk. This was to be the first step of an official career, but he was already hopelessly enamored of music. He soon met the Rubinstein brothers, Anton and Nikolai; both were composers, and Anton was a pianist second only to Franz Liszt in technical brilliance and fame. In 1862 Anton opened Russia's first conservatory, under the sponsorship of the Imperial Russian Music Society (IRMS), in St. Petersburg, and Tchaikovsky was its first composition student.

Early Works

Tchaikovsky's early works were technically sound but not memorable. Anton Rubinstein was demanding and critical, often unjustly so, and when Tchaikovsky graduated 2 years later he was still somewhat cowed by Anton's harshness. In 1866 Nikolai Rubinstein invited Tchaikovsky to Moscow to live with him and serve as professor of composition at the Moscow Conservatory, which he had just established. Tchaikovsky's father was now in financial trouble, and the composer had to support himself on the meager earnings from the conservatory. The symphonic poems Fatum and Romeo and Juliet that he wrote in 1869 were the first works to show the style he was thereafter to cultivate. Romeo and Juliet was redone with Mily Balakirev's help in 1870 and again in 1879.

During the seventies and later, there was considerable communication between Tchaikovsky and the Rubinsteins on the one hand and the members of the Mighty Five, Balakirev, Aleksandr Borodin, Modest Mussorgsky, Nicolai Rimsky-Korsakov, and César Cui, on the other. The traditional "enmity" between the two groups seems a concoction of romantic biographers. Tchaikovsky functioned as an all-around musician in the early seventies, and, as expected of an IRMS licentiate, he taught, composed, wrote critical essays, and conducted, the last not very well. In 1875 he composed what is perhaps his most universally known and loved work, the Piano Concerto No. 1. Anton Rubinstein was sarcastic in his dislike, although it became one of the most popular items in his own repertoire as a concert pianist. Vying in popularity with the concerto is Tchaikovsky's ballet Swan Lake (1876). It is the most successful ballet ever written if measured in terms of broad audience appeal.

A Disastrous Marriage

In 1877 Tchaikovsky married the 28-year-old Antonina Miliukova, his student at the conservatory; it has been suggested that she remained him of Tatiana, his heroine in his opera-in-process, Eugene Onegin. His unfortunate wife, who died insane in 1917, not only suffered violent rejection by her husband but also the vicious libel of Modeste Tchaikovsky, his brother's biographer. Modeste, like Peter a misogynist, vilified her in the biography in an attempt to shield Peter and mask his weaknesses. Subsequent biographers, uncritically and perhaps with relish, repeated and embroidered upon Modeste's assertion that Antonina was cheap, high-strung, and neurotic.

Tchaikovsky was scarcely to find out her character: within a few weeks he had fled Moscow alone for an extended stay abroad. He made arrangements through relatives never to see his wife again. In his correspondence of this period - indeed through a large part of his career - he was periodically morbid about all aspects of his life: about his wife, money, his friends, even his music and himself. He often spoke of suicide. This, too, is a favorite theme of his many biographers. Even during his life he was treated unkindly by critics who sharpened their sarcastic vocabularies on his open, vulnerable, emotionally based music. But he never sought to change his style, though he was dissatisfied, at one time or another, with most of his works; and he never stopped composing.

Arrangement with Madame von Meck

At about the same time as his abortive marriage, Tchaikovsky entered into a liaison of quite another kind. Through third parties an unusual but fruitful arrangement with the immensely wealthy Nadezhda von Meck was made: she was attracted by his music and the possibility of patronizing him, and he was frank in his interest in her money and what it could provide him. For 13 years she supported him at a base rate of 6, 000 rubles a year, with whatever "bonuses" he could manage to extract. He was free to quit the conservatory, and he began a series of travels and stays abroad.

Von Meck and Tchaikovsky purposely never met, save for one or two accidental encounters. In their voluminous correspondence the composer discusses his music thoughtfully; it is disenchanting to note that in letters to his family he complains cavalierly of her parsimony. He dedicated his Fourth Symphony (1877) to her. Tchaikovsky finished Eugene Onegin in 1879; it is his only opera generally performed outside the Soviet Union. Other works of this period are the Violin Concerto (1881), the Fifth Symphony (1888), and the ballet Sleeping Beauty (1889).

Tchaikovsky's fame and his activity now extended to all of Europe and America. To rest from his public appearances he chose a country retreat in Klin near Moscow. From this was derived the "Hermit of Klin" nickname, though hermit he never was. In 1890 he finished the opera Queen of Spades, based on Aleksandr Pushkin's story. As with many of his other works, Tchaikovsky was highly involved emotionally, and he was gratified when, despite the grousing "experts, " the opera was enthusiastically received. In late 1890 Von Meck cut him off. He was self-sustaining by then, but the rebuff rankled. Even Modeste expressed surprise at his irritation. Tchaikovsky had an immensely successful tour in the United States in 1891.

The Sixth Symphony was first heard in October 1893, with the composer conducting. This work, named at Modeste's suggestion Pathétique, was poorly received, very likely because of the inadequate conducting. Tchaikovsky never knew of its eventual astonishing success, for he contracted cholera and died, muttering abuse of Von Meck, on November 6.

Tchaikovsky's gift was melody - sobbing, singing, exalting melody. Yet, one of his favorite and recurring melodic patterns was a simple five-or six-note minor scale, usually descending, which he enveloped in orchestral color or lush harmonies often electrifying in their piquancy and effectiveness.

Further Reading

Tchaikovsky's story is obscured, first, by the work by his brother Modeste, Life of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (3 vols., 1900-1902; English abridgment by Rosa Newmarch, 1906), which, while otherwise authoritative, cloaks vital segments of the composer's life; second, by puritanical attitudes which keep archives in Klin tightly closed; and third, by the opportunistic sensationalism of many writers who perform Freudian acrobatics with the few facts they possess of the composer's life. M. D. Calvocoressi and Gerald Abraham, Masters of Russian Music (1936), is sound, as is Abraham's Tchaikovsky: A Short Biography (1944), derived from the former work. David Brook, Six Great Russian Composers (1946), includes a chapter on Tchaikovsky. John Gee and Elliot Selby, The Triumph of Tchaikovsky (1960), and Lawrence and Elizabeth Hanson, Tchaikovsky: The Man behind the Music (1966), are undistinguished biographies. The Tchaikovsky-Von Meck correspondence was published in Russian (3 vols., 1933-1936), and a one-volume English abridgment is available. Beloved Friend (1937), by Catherine Drinker Bowen and Barbara von Meck, is a fictionalized but not inaccurate account based on the aforementioned letters.

For more information on Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, visit Britannica.com.

Tchaikovsky, Pyotr (b Votkinsk, 7 May 1840, d St Petersburg, 6 Nov. 1893). Russian composer. The most significant ballet composer of the 19th century, he wrote the music for three ballets: Swan Lake (staged Moscow 1877, restaged St Petersburg 1895), The Sleeping Beauty (St Petersburg 1890), and The Nutcracker (St Petersburg, 1892). To this day, they remain the most popular ballet scores of all time, thanks to the emotional depth and rich drama of Tchaikovsky's writing for dance. Much of his concert music has also been used by choreographers. A list of ballets using Tchaikovsky's music includes Autumn Song (Nijinska, 1915), Eros, Francesca da Rimini, Prelude, Romance (all Fokine, 1915), Andantino (Fokine, 1916), The Seasons (Lavrovsky, 1928), Mozartiana (Balanchine, 1933), Les Présages (Massine, 1933), Serenade (Balanchine, 1934), Kittens (Jacobson, 1936), Romeo and Juliet (Bartholin, 1937), Francesca da Rimini (Lichine, 1937, Lifar, 1958), Meditations (Jacobson, 1938), Romeo and Juliet (W. Christensen, 1938, also Lifar, 1942, Jacobson, 1944, Skibine, 1950), Ballet Imperial (Balanchine, 1941), Aleko (Massine, 1942), Hamlet (Helpmann, 1942), Ancient Russia (Nijinska, 1943), Tchaikovsky Waltz (Taras, 1946), Theme and Variations (Balanchine, 1947), Designs with Strings (Taras, 1948), Waltz (Jacobson, 1948), Tragédie à Verone (Skibine, 1950), Les Oiseaux d'or (Lichine, 1954), Eugene Onegin (V. Gsovsky, 1954), Allegro Brillante (Balanchine, 1956), L'Amour et son destin (Lifar, 1957), Beauty and the Beast (L. Christensen, 1958), Pas de deux (Balanchine, 1960), La Dame de pique (Lifar, 1960, also Petit, 1978), Snow Maiden (Bourmeister, 1961), Mirror Walkers (P. Wright, 1963), Onegin (Cranko, 1965), Jewels (Balanchine, 1967, ‘Diamonds’ section), Ni fleurs ni couronnes (Béjart, 1968), Suite No. 3 (Balanchine, 1970), Anastasia (MacMillan, 1971), Nijinsky, clown de Dieu (Béjart, 1971), Reflections (Arpino, 1971), War and Peace (Panov, 1980), Souvenir de Florence (Taras, 1981), Capriccio italien (Martins, 1981), Symphony No. 1 (Martins, 1981), Andantino (Robbins, 1981), Piano Pieces (Robbins, 1981), Family Portraits (Cullberg, 1985), Le Chat botté (Petit, 1985), Battleship Potemkin (Vinogradov, 1986), Winter Dreams (MacMillan, 1991), and Alice in Wonderland (Deane, mus. Tchaikovsky, arr. Carl Davis, 1995).

Tchaikovsky, Piotr Ilyich (1840–93), Russian composer. Although Tchaikovsky's works include six symphonies, two piano concertos, a violin concerto, and several operas, none are more highly regarded than his fairy‐tale ballets; his music for Swan Lake (Le Lac des cygnes, 1877), The Sleeping Beauty (La Belle au bois dormant, 1890), and The Nutcracker (Casse noisette, 1892) is considered incomparable of its kind. His father, a government official in the Department of Mines, allowed him piano lessons as a child, but planned a career in the civil service for him. Tchaikovsky spent seven years at the School of Jurisprudence and obtained a clerkship at the Ministry of Justice in 1859. Before long, however, he was attending classes at St Petersburg's new music conservatory, and in 1863 he resigned his unrewarding position to study music full‐time. Although he became friends with Balakirev's ‘Mighty Handful’, particularly with Rimsky‐Korsakov, he never shared their commitment to Russian folk sources, but remained primarily oriented towards the European musical mainstream. In 1866 he became a professor of harmony at the new music conservatory in Moscow; within a few years he was a well‐known, though not always successful, composer. Tchaikovsky suffered all his life from mental instability and depression, exacerbated by the need to conceal his homosexuality. In 1877 he made a desperate attempt at marriage, which ended a few weeks later when he waded into an icy river, vainly hoping to catch pneumonia, and then fled to St Petersburg in a state of mental collapse; he never saw his wife again. A far more congenial and productive relationship was his long epistolary friendship with the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck. Although they never met—save for a few accidental glimpses—she supported him both artistically and financially for years. When she abruptly broke off their correspondence, he was devastated. Three years later, he was dead of cholera, after drinking a glass of unboiled water—possibly, a suicide.

No one knows who had the initial idea or wrote the scenario for Swan Lake, but it may have been Tchaikovsky himself. Although the story is nominally set in Germany, swan maidens recur in many Russian folk tales, and Tchaikovsky had apparently devised a children's ballet on this theme for his nieces six years earlier, from which he drew the swan theme introduced by the oboe in the finale of Act I. The situation of the hero, Prince Siegfried, is even reminiscent of the composer's—only months before his disastrous marriage. The Prince, too, is reluctant to marry, though he resigns himself to his mother's command that he choose a bride at her next ball. His love for Odette, the enchanted swan, is in the romantic fairy‐bride tradition, in which such a relationship represents no earthly sexual passion but the yearning for an ideal that exists only in the imagination. When he succumbs to Odile at the ball, it is only because she resembles Odette, and this unfaithfulness to his ideal brings about his destruction as well as hers. Odette loses her magical protection and they are drowned together in the lake.

The first production was not a success. The choreography was poor, and Tchaikovsky's bold attempt to realize the dramatic possibilities of the story through his music was puzzling both to the dancers and to the audience, who expected ballet to be primarily a decorative spectacle with an incidental plot. Swan Lake was not produced again until 1895, when it was completely re‐choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov and its scenario revised—including the substitution of a happy ending for Tchaikovsky's tragic and powerful conclusion.

The collaboration of Tchaikovsky with Petipa in The Sleeping Beauty, however, was a true partnership, to a degree unheard of at that time. Petipa gave Tchaikovsky a complete programme to work from, specifying the character, tempo, and exact duration of each dance, and Tchaikovsky invented brilliantly within this framework. For dancers, Petipa's masterpiece requires, above all other ballets, the greatest command of classical technique. It is also the ballet which most strongly emphasizes its relationship with the fairy tale. Petipa uses only the first half of Perrault's ‘Sleeping Beauty’—omitting the long episode of the Prince's ogrish mother. He greatly elaborates what remains, in effect constructing a literary fairy tale of his own based on Perrault's—assigning new names to the characters, creating additional characters and episodes, and enhancing the magical aspect of the story. (For example, Prince Florimund first sees Princess Aurora in a vision, dancing amid a band of fairies, then voyages to her castle in the Lilac Fairy's magic boat.) Petipa's homage to the fairy tale reaches a climax in the final scene (sometimes performed independently as Aurora's Wedding), in which characters from several other tales join the wedding celebration: the White Cat dances with Puss‐in‐Boots, the Bluebird with the Enchanted Princess, even Little Red Riding Hood with her Wolf.

Tchaikovsky was less satisfied with the Petipa–Ivanov collaboration which produced The Nutcracker. The scenario, based on a simplified version by Alexandre Dumas père of E. T. A. Hoffmann's fairy tale The Nutcracker and the Mouse King (Nussknäcker und Mause‐könig), seemed incoherent and pointless. Act II, for example, consisted of a series of unrelated dances performed for the entertainment of the heroine and her Prince. Tchaikovsky felt enthusiasm only for his new instrument, the celeste, which he had ordered from its Parisian inventor to play the tinkling music of the Sugar Plum Fairy. Since its unimpressive première, however, The Nutcracker has become the most widely performed of all ballets and, for innumerable children, an unforgettable introduction to ballet's magic world. Each ballet company has tackled the problematic scenario in its own way—two famous solutions being George Balanchine's and the Kent Stowell–Maurice Sendak production, which attempts to reinstate Hoffmann's version of the story. What remains constant and timeless is Tchaikovsky's music.

Bibliography

• Anderson, Jack, The Nutcracker Ballet (1979).
• Brown, David, Tchaikovsky (1982).
• Sendak, Maurice, Introduction to E. T. A. Hoffmann, Nutcracker (1984).
• Wiley, Roland John, Tchaikovsky's Ballets (1985).

— Suzanne Rahn

(1840 - 1893), Russian composer.

Arguably the most famous Russian composer, Tchaikovsky was the first to achieve renown beyond Russia's borders and establish a place for Russian music in the repertories of Western concert halls and musical theaters. The first professional Russian composer to receive a thorough musical education, the import of Tchaikovsky's achievement owes much to his mastery of the dominant nineteenth-century musical genre: the symphony. Yet Tchaikovsky's enormous range, versatility, and output - he composed in all the major genres, including symphonies, operas, ballets, chamber works, songs, as well as compositions for solo instruments - assure the composer's place among the most popular and prolific European composers of his day.

Tchaikovsky's virtual dominance of the Russian musical scene by the end of his life aroused the envy of the nationalist composers known as the Mighty Handful, yet Tchaikovsky's ability to adapt native folk material to established Western compositional structures proved more successful than their more earnest attempts to craft from those materials a unique native musical language. Four Tchaikovsky masterworks, representing three genres in which Tchaikovsky particularly excelled, were the fruits of an unprecedented final creative flourish: the opera Queen of Spades (1891), the ballets Sleeping Beauty (1889), The Nutcracker (1892), and the Sixth Symphony (1893).

Although Tchaikovsky's music was deemed bourgeois in the relatively radical period following the 1917 Revolution, these criticisms faded in the Josef Stalin era, when the monumental art of the previous century once again found favor, and Tchaikovsky was hailed as a symphonist par excellence - the composer's homosexuality, the perceived melancholy of his music, and his conservative politics notwithstanding. Tchaikovsky died of cholera in St. Petersburg in 1893, though a very active party of mostly Russian researchers allege the composer's death was the result of a suicide brought about by a crisis over his homosexuality.

Bibliography

Brown, David. (1978 - 1992). Tchaikovsky: A Biographical and Critical Study. London: Gollancz.

Orlova, A., ed. (1990). Tchaikovsky: A Self-Portrait. New York: Oxford University Press.

Poznansky, Alexander. (1991). Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man. New York: Simon and Schuster Macmillan.

Poznansky, Alexander, and Brett Langston. (2002). The Tchaikovsky Handbook: A Guide to the Man and His Music, comp. Alexander Poznansky and Brett Langston. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Taruskin, Richard. (1997). Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

—TIM SCHOLL

(ĭlyēch' chīkôf'skē) , 1840–93, Russian composer, b. Kamsko-Votkinsk. Variant transliterations of his name include Tschaikovsky and Chaikovsky. He is a towering figure in Russian music and one of the most popular composers in history.

The son of a mining inspector, Tchaikovsky studied music as a child. At 19 he became a government clerk and at 21 entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he studied composition with Anton Rubinstein. He graduated in 1865 and taught theory and composition at Nicholas Rubinstein's Moscow Conservatory from 1865 to 1878. An annuity from his wealthy patroness, Mme von Meck (whom he never met though he corresponded with her for 14 years and dedicated his Fourth Symphony to her in 1878), made it possible for him to devote himself entirely to composition. Tchaikovsky wrote 11 operas, four concertos, six symphonies, a great number of songs and short piano pieces, three ballets, three string quartets, suites and symphonic poems, and numerous other works.

His compositions sustained him throughout his continuous battle with his own nature. In 1877 Tchaikovsky made a disastrous marriage in order to defeat the torment of his homosexuality and to deny the spreading rumors of it. His work was again his consolation when Mme van Meck terminated her friendship and support without apparent reason. Tchaikovsky was opposed to the aims of the Russian nationalist composers and used Western European forms and idioms, although his work instinctively reflects the Russian temperament. His orchestration is rich, and his music is melodious, intensely emotional, and often melancholy.

The most successful of his compositions are his orchestral works, notably his last three symphonies; the fantasies Romeo and Juliet (1869, rev. 1870 and 1879) and Francesca da Rimini (1876); Marche slave (1876); the Manfred Symphony (1886); the ballets Swan Lake (1877), The Sleeping Beauty (1890), and The Nutcracker (1892; also arranged as a suite for orchestra); and the Piano Concerto in B Flat Minor (1875) and the Violin Concerto in D (1881). Of his operas, notable are Vakula, the Smith (1876); Eugene Onegin (1879) and The Queen of Spades (1890), both from stories by Pushkin; and The Maid of Orleans (1881). None of the operas, however, achieved the popularity of his symphonies, ballets, and concertos.

Tchaikovsky toured Europe as a conductor, performing his Marche solennelle at the opening concert in Carnegie Hall, New York City, in 1891. A few days after he conducted the première of his Sixth Symphony, or Symphonie pathétique, he died, reportedly of cholera. Some experts believe that the cause was really suicide, possibly precipitated by the threatened revelation of a homosexual relationship. Tchaikovsky's most gifted followers in Russia were Rachmaninov and Arenski; his influence has been great, particularly in England and the United States.

Bibliography

See his life and letters by his brother Modeste, ed. by R. Newmarch (2 vol., 1905, repr. 1970); diaries, ed. by W. Lakond (tr. 1945); biographies by H. Weinstock (1943), L. and E. Hanson (1966), and A. Holden (1996); studies by G. E. H. Abraham, ed. (1946, repr. 1969), J. H. Warrack (1969), E. Garden (1973), and D. Brown (1978).

(cheye-kawf-skee)

A nineteenth-century Russian composer. His most celebrated works include several symphonies, including the Symphonie Pathétique, and three ballets, The Nutcracker, Swan Lake, and Sleeping Beauty.