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{chy-kawf'-skee}
The eminent Russian composer Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky was born
on May 7 (N.S.), 1840, in a settlement adjacent to the Kama-Votkinsk
Metal Works (managed by his father) in the Ural Mountains.
The first mention of his involvement with music appears in
a letter of 1844 that reports him as having helped compose
a song, "Mama's in Petersburg." At home he heard
folk songs, popular arias, and romances sung by his mother,
and pieces played by a mechanical organ, among them excerpts
from Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart's Don Giovanni. (Mozart would
remain Tchaikovsky's most beloved composer.) Piano lessons,
started about the age of five, continued in Saint Petersburg,
where he entered boarding school in 1848. From 1850 to 1859
he attended the School of Jurisprudence, where he assisted
in a choir conducted by Gavriil Lomakin and studied piano
with Rudolph Kundinger and harmony with Kundinger's brother.
Assigned on graduation to the Ministry of Justice, Tchaikovsky
continued to be drawn to music, and in 1861 he began classes
sponsored by the Russian Music Society. The year after, he
left his job and entered the just-founded Saint Petersburg
Conservatory. Working zealously under Anton Rubinstein and
Nikolai Zaremba, he received a Silver Medal for his graduation
cantata on Johann Schiller's An die Freude in December 1865.
At Nikolai Rubinstein's invitation, Tchaikovsky taught theory
in Moscow, joining the faculty of the new Moscow Conservatory
when it opened in September 1866. During his 11 years there,
he composed his Piano Concerto no. 1 (1875), the ballet Swan
Lake (1876), four operas, three symphonies, and many smaller
works. He also established close ties with the composers of
the nationalist group known as "The Five," especially
Mily Balakirev and Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov; the critic Vladimir
Stasov called him the "sixth member of their circle."
Marriage in July 1877 to Antonina Miliukova triggered an emotional
crisis, perhaps related to his homosexuality, that brought
him near suicide. He fled Moscow in a state of turmoil but
managed to finish three masterpieces--the Fourth Symphony,
the Violin Concerto, and the opera Eugene Onegin--before May
1878, when his wife agreed to separation (they were never
divorced). An annuity from Nadezhda von Meck, granted during
his crisis, allowed him to quit (1878) teaching. His association
with von Meck, begun in an exchange of letters about a commission
in 1876, was sustained in voluminous correspondence over 13
years, although they never met. From 1878 to 1885, Tchaikovsky
lived sometimes in Russia, sometimes in western Europe. His
reputation grew with the Capriccio italien (1880), the 1812
overture (1880), two more operas the Liturgy (1878) and the
Vespers (1881). During his last years he lived in or near
Moscow. In 1888, Tsar Alexander III granted him a yearly pension.
Tchaikovsky's fame, as both conductor and composer, spread
as the result of a series of international tours, which brought
him to the United States in 1891. He continued to compose--the
ballets Sleeping Beauty (1889) and Nutcracker (1892), the
Fifth (1888), Sixth (1893), and Manfred (1885) symphonies,
and three final operas. Younger composers emulated him, among
them Sergei Taneyev, Anton Arensky, Mikhail Ippolitov-Ivanov,
and, later, Sergei Rachmaninoff. A few days after conducting
the premiere of his Sixth Symphony, he contracted cholera
and died in Saint Petersburg on Nov. 6 (N.S.), 1893.
Tchaikovsky's lyric gift owes much to Russian folk song, which
he quotes (First Piano Concerto, Second and Fourth symphonies)
or imitates (First Symphony, Second String Quartet), and to
the 19th-century Russian salon song, whose traits permeate
his vocal melody (songs and romances, Eugene Onegin) and even
infuse his instrumental themes (Fifth and Sixth symphonies).
The expressive pathos of his themes depends on abundant use
of suspensions and anticipations, which also pervade his rich
harmonies.
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