PYOTR ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY

A Lawyer in the Making, Against All Odds

I was born on 7 May 1840 in Votkinsk, a small town in the Vyatka province of Russia, where my father Ilya worked as a mining engineer. I was the second son, after my brother Nikolay, and a crowd of younger brothers and sisters soon followed, including the twins Anatoly and Modest. My mother died of cholera in 1854, when I was fourteen, and I'm not sure I ever fully got over it. Meanwhile I was sent to the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in St Petersburg, where I studied from 1850 to 1859, so for a long time everyone expected me to become a respectable government clerk and not a composer.

The Clerk Who Ran Away to the Orchestra

In 1862 I finally enrolled at the brand new St Petersburg Conservatory, which was a bit like switching from accounting to circus school. My teacher there was Anton Rubinstein, a demanding man who made sure I actually worked for my talent. I graduated in 1865, and suddenly the law clerk had become a professional musician. A few years later, in 1869, I wrote my first version of Romeo and Juliet, which is not a ballet but an orchestral fantasy-overture, a single big piece that tells the lovers' story without a word being sung.

Moscow Needs a Teacher

On 13 September 1866 I took a post at the newly opened Moscow Conservatory, and Moscow became my home base for the next dozen years. I taught there until I resigned in November 1878, and I'll admit that standing in front of a class was never my favorite way to spend a morning. Still, the city gave me a steady income, friends, and a theatre, the Bolshoi, where some of my music would be heard for the first time. It was the kind of place where a shy man could keep his head down and write, at least until life interrupted.

The Greatest Hits, Politely Arranged

Swan Lake was first performed at the Bolshoi in Moscow on 4 March 1877, and it tells of a prince, a lake, and a girl under a spell, with music that rises and sinks like water. My Piano Concerto No 1 opens with big, ringing chords and a sweeping tune that feels like someone throwing open the doors of a grand hall. The Nutcracker came much later, in December 1892, a Christmas fairy tale full of sparkling bells and sweets, and it was first shown at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg. My Symphony No 6 is the darkest of the four, a piece that starts quietly in the shadows and ends by fading slowly away into silence.

The Year Everything Went Wrong

In July 1877 I married Antonina Milyukova, and I'm afraid it was one of the worst decisions of my life. The marriage was over by the beginning of October, so it lasted only a few months, which is shorter than some of my symphonies feel to a bored teenager. Luckily a wealthy woman named Nadezhda von Meck came to my rescue and supported me financially from the late 1870s. We wrote to each other for fourteen years, and she never asked for anything but music and conversation, and her last letter reached me on 4 October 1890.

Travelling Man, Final Chapters

In my last years I became a conductor of my own work, and on 5 May 1891 I stood in New York to open the new Music Hall that Carnegie had built. The Sleeping Beauty had already appeared at the Mariinsky Theatre in January 1890, and The Nutcracker followed in 1892. On 28 October 1893 I conducted the first performance of my Sixth Symphony, the one that people call the "Pathétique". Only days later, on 6 November, I died in St Petersburg at the age of 53, officially from cholera, though the story goes that there may have been more to it, and nobody knows for certain.

Still Playing, Still Pirouetting

More than a century later my ballets are still danced in theatres all over the world, and many people hear The Nutcracker every single December. My 1812 Overture, first played in Moscow in August 1882, has cannons in it, which probably explains why it is so popular at outdoor concerts. Musicians keep returning to my concertos and symphonies because the melodies are simple enough to hum and the feelings in them are never small. I like to think I helped show that Russian music could be both elegant and wildly emotional at the same time.

What I'd Like You to Take Home

If you take only one thing from my music, I hope it is the feeling that it is perfectly fine to feel strongly. I wrote about joy, longing, fear, and sadness without apology, and I never saw the point of hiding any of it. So put on a piece, close your eyes, and let a melody carry you somewhere you haven't been for a while. And if you happen to cry a little, that's quite all right, because I certainly did while writing it.