P.I.Tchaikovsky's Private Life
Petr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born at Votkinsk in the government of
Vyatka, May 7, 1840, second in a family of five sons. His father Ilya
Petrovich Tchaikovsky was a chief inspector of mines. From early childhood
the future composer loved nature and folk music. As a youth he reluctantly
studied law at School of Jurisprudence in St.Petersburg and even became a
petty clerk in the Ministry of Justice. But in his early twenties he rebelled
and against his family wishes had the courage to throw himself into the study
of music at the St.Petersburg Conservatory. He was a ready improviser, playing
well for dancing and had a naturally rich sense of harmony, but was so little
schooled as to be astonished when a cousin told him it was possible to
modulate from any key to another. He went frequently to the Italian operas
which at that time almost monopolized the Russian stage and laid the foundation
of his lifelong love for Mozart. He was an ardent worker, and once, when Anton
Rubinstein, his teacher of composition, asked for variations, he sat up all
night and brought in two hundred. In 1863 Tchaikovsky resigns his post at the
Ministry of Justice in order to devote all his time to music study (Theory under
Zaremba, orchestration under Anton Rubinstein).
Early in 1866 he removed permanently to Moscow with which all his later musical
fortunes are associated, accepting a teaching post of a professor of composition
in the newly founded Conservatory of music established by A.Rubinsteins brother
Nicholas. Tchaikovsky joined the circles of Moscow intelligence. He got
acquanted with V.Odoevsky, A.Ostrovsky, L.Tolstoi. He started to compose.
His early attempts at composition, largely because of that same fatal facility,
had displeased himself as well as his friends; on one of them, with that
same impersonal candour always flashing out from him, he had scribbled the
words: "dreadful muck". Yet now he had the courage to attempt his first
symphony "Winter Dreams". Musically it is not of great importance, any more
than are indeed the second and third.
On vacations Tchaikovsky went abroad, visited his friends in Ukraine and
Tambov government. Very often these trips became the source of creative
inspiration.
The first decade of Tchaikovsky's life in Moscow was one of much struggle,
intensified by several attacks of the nervous depression and morbid self-disgust
always dogging him, of first meeting with some of his contemporaries, such as
Turgenev, Tolstoi, Berlioz, Liszt, Saint-Saens and Wagner, of an abortive
love-affair with opera singer Desiree Artot, and above all of a varied production
of many kinds of music from operas to string quartets, which laid the foundation
of his skill and fame. Most of the operas, written hastily, uncritically and
sometimes on wretched librettos, were failures, the scores of which in a number
of cases he himself destroyed.
In 1876 Tchaikovsky begins correspondence with Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck.
The widow of a wealthy railway engineer fell under the spell of Tchaikovsky's
music. As one of the richest women in Moscow N. von Meck was a well-educated
person with the delicate feeling for music. She rendered him not only a
financial but also moral support. The long correspondence with him reveals for
us so much of his inner life.
In 1877 Petr Tchaikovsky decided to marry Antonina Ivanovna
Milyukova who hurted herself at his head, declaring in a letter her
love for him. Within a month he discovered their utter incompatibility and was
driven to despair by an irresistable aversion to his wife. In a state of mind
bordering on madness Tchaikovsky moved abroad. He leaves for Switzerland,
settling at Clarens, a quiet village on Lake Geneva, where he later did some
of his best works. Nadezhda von Meck offers him an annuity of 6,000 roubles.
In 1878 Tchaikovsky finds his duties at the Conservatory quite
unbearable and resigns his professorship. From now he works much in
Clarens, Paris, Rome, Florence and other European places. Sometimes he visits
Moscow, working and attending the performances of his works. In the end he
became tired of all his journeys and in 1885 he rents a house in Maidanovo
near Klin and commences there his Manfred Symphony on a scheme by Balakirev.
In 1887 Tchaikovsky makes his first appearance as a concert conductor at
St.Petersburg in a program of his own works and in 1888 makes a highly
successful international concert tour. In early May 1892 he returns to his
country house at Klin and there in 1893 begins the Sixth Symphony. The
Symphony was performed under his direction at St.Petersburg in October 28,
1893 without marked success. Tchaikovsky did not live to witness its success.
Some days later (November 6, 1893) he drank a glass of unboiled water and
died of cholera. He was buried in Alexander Nevsky Lavra in St.Petersburg.
Tchaikovsky's creative heritage is very large. Just below you may see some of
his most popular works. They are operas:
"Eugene Onegin" (1878),
"Mazepa" (1883),
"Sorceress" (1887),
"Cherevichki" (1885),
"Queen of Spades" (1890),
"Iolanta" (1891);
balets:
"Swan Lake" (1876),
"Sleeping Beauty" (1889),
"The Nutcracker" (1892).
Such works as the Overture-Fantasy
"Romeo and Juliet",
"Italian Capriccio",
Symphonic Fantasia "Francesca da Rimini",
"Variations on a Rococo Theme"
for cello and orchestra are the famous masterpieces by P.I.Tchaikovsky.
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Tchaikovsky