Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
1840-1893
MASTER COMPOSER OF CLASSICAL BALLET.
Born: May 7, 1840, Kamsko-Votkinsk.
Died: 1893.
A Wealth of Melodic Inspiration.
Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (also spelled Pyotr Ilyich Chaikovsky, or Tschaikovsky) was a leading Russian composer of the late nineteenth century, whose works are notable for their melodic inspiration and their orchestration. He is regarded as the master composer for classical ballet, as demonstrated by his scores for Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, and Sleeping Beauty.
Early Life and Education.
Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840, in Kamsko-Votkinsk, a small industrial town east of Moscow. Tchaikovsky's father was superintendent of government-owned mines, but also was in possession of a great variety of music, playable on the "Orchestrion," a rudimentary form of a record player. It was his listening of tunes from the opera Don Giovanni on the Orchestrion that Pyotr dedicated his lifelong admiration to Mozart. "It was due to Mozart that I devoted my life to music," he wrote many years later.
Tchaikovsky began to play the piano early in childhood. His first teacher was Maria Palchikova, a freed serf. Within a year, Tchaikovsky was able to play better than she could. He adored his governess, but she was dismissed in 1848 when his father changed his post and moved to Moscow and then to St. Petersburg, where the boy entered the preparatory department of the School of Jurisprudence in 1850. There he was obviously disturbed by being treated as a "country bumpkin," but he soon settled down happily. A reluctant student, Tchaikovsky worked without much interest, but was naturally gifted and quickly passed through his school's upper divisions.
His state of mind was more seriously affected in 1854 when he was 14 and his mother, whom he loved with all the ardor of an acutely introspective child, died of cholera. To alleviate the distress caused to him both by her death and by his easygoing father's comparative indifference to it, he composed a short waltz for piano and even thought of composing an opera.
Tchaikovsky entered the Ministry of Justice in St. Petersburg as civil servant. To ordinary Russians, civil servants were then people to be shunned and hated: They represented petty officialdom and oppression. Tchaikovsky was not naturally suited to such a job. He remained at the Ministry of Justice for four years, bored but dutiful.
A Serious Musical Career Begins.
He entered the newly founded St. Petersburg Conservatory of Music in 1862. His job as a clerk in the Ministry of Justice was hardly interesting enough to prevent his increasing absorption with music. A tale is told of his absentmindedly tearing pieces from an official document, munching at them steadily, and recovering his senses only to find that he had consumed them altogether.
Tchaikovsky had plenty of time for music, playing the piano and going to concerts. He joined the Ministry's own choral group, and in 1861, he began to study musical theory under Nikolai Zaremba, the Head of the Russian Musical Society.
One of Tchaikovsky's music teachers was the pianist and composer Anton Rubenstein, who became the first director of the St. Petersburg Music Conservatory. He had observed that Tchaikovsky's technique was merely amateur, so he corrected the young man's exercises. Rubenstein was the first to see real signs of talent, but had to criticize Tchaikovsky for years of careless work. Tchaikovsky began to realize that he had to be serious about his music in order to make true progress.
When he failed to get a promotion he had wanted at the Ministry, he decided to resign and start his career all over again. Tchaikovsky entered the St. Petersburg Music Conservatory at the age of twenty-two, and was much older than most of the other students. But he also had more experience, and supported himself by teaching pupils of his own. He learned how to play the organ and mastered the flute, which he then played in the Conservatory orchestra.
His first orchestral score (composed in 1864), an overture based on Aleksandr Ostrovsky's melancholy play The Storm, is remarkable in showing many of the stylistic features later to be associated with his music. The Storm Overture attracted the critical eye of Rubenstein, who had expected Tchaikovsky's composition to be dark and dreary. Tchaikovsky instead created a colorful, dramatic piece of "program music," including unusual instruments such as the harp, oboe, and tuba. Rubenstein was furious because this was not the kind of thing he expected from his normally obedient students.
Even so, Tchaikovsky was offered in late 1865 a post as professor of harmony by Rubenstein's brother Nikolai at the newly-established Moscow Conservatory. The appointment didn't silence brother Anton, who was very critical of Tchaikovsky's graduation exercise, a cantata representing Schiller's Ode to Joy. The cantata was performed January 12, 1866, in the presence of a distinguished audience - but Tchaikovsky was too nervous to face the pressure of the occasion. Rubenstein threatened to withhold Tchaikovsky's diploma, but nobody could deny Pyotr's outstanding talent. His presence was now known.
Nikolai offered lodgings and support to Pyotr for the following five years. Nevertheless, as Tchaikovsky faced the new pressures of teaching, he overworked himself and his students.
A Distinct Affinity with Nationalism.
Tchaikovsky settled down comfortably in Moscow in January 1866, although he underwent a mental crisis as a consequence of overwork on his Symphony No. 1 in G Minor (Winter Daydreams), Opus 13 (1866). His compositions of the late 1860s and early 1870s reveal a distinct affinity with the music of the nationalist group of composers in St. Petersburg, both in their treatment of folk song and in their harmonies deriving from a common link with Mikhail Glinka, the "father" of a Russian nationalist style. Tchaikovsky corresponded with the leader of the group, Mily Balakirev, at whose suggestion he wrote a fantasy overture, Romeo and Juliet (1869).
In 1885 he bought a house of his own at Maidanovo in the vicinity of Moscow, where he lived until the year before his death, when he moved into the house that is now the Tchaikovsky House Museum in the nearby town of Klin. He began to travel more in Russia, spending two particularly delightful vacations in the Caucasus, where he was enthusiastically feted at Tbilisi.
He overcame an aversion to conducting, with successful performances of the newly revised Vakula, and in 1888 he undertook an important foreign tour, directing his own works in Leipzig (where he met the composers Johannes Brahms and Edvard Grieg), Hamburg, Berlin, Prague, Paris, and London. His music was well received everywhere. This tour was the apex of Tchaikovsky's later life.
From then on, in spite of the continuing success of many of his former compositions and the acclamation of new ones, including his second Pushkin opera, The Queen of Spades, and his favorite ballet, The Sleeping Beauty (first received coolly; both performed 1890), Tchaikovsky was working his way toward another nervous breakdown.
His major compositions, starting with Symphony No. 5 in E Minor, Opus 64 (1888), became more and more intense and emotional, filled with hysterical exaltation and neurotic despair. Tchaikovsky went on further tours, including to the United States and England, where he conducted his popular Piano Concerto No. 1 in B Flat Minor, Opus 23 (composed 1874-75) in 1889 and his Fourth Symphony in 1893.
In 1893 he was also awarded an honorary degree of doctor of music at the University of Cambridge. These and other successes, including the tumultuous reception accorded to the suite he hastily made for concert performance from his Nutcracker ballet music (1892), did not alter the inexorable decline in his mental condition.
Assessing the Value of His Creations.
Among the most subjective of composers, Tchaikovsky is inseparable from his music. His work is a manifestation, sometimes charming, often showy, and occasionally vulgar, of repressed feelings that became more and more despairing in later years and culminated in the composition of the Sixth Symphony, one of the greatest symphonic works of its time.
Though unequal, his music shows a wealth of melodic inspiration and imagination and a flair for orchestration. Its lapses of taste are partly redeemed by enormous technical efficiency. Though his later work rejected conscious Russian nationalism, its underlying sentiment and character are as distinctively Russian as that of the Russian nationalist composers.
Tchaikovsky's success in bridging the gulf between the musician and the general public partly accounts for the position he enjoyed in the Soviet Union.
No composer since Tchaikovsky has suffered more from changes of fashion or from the extremes of over and under valuation. On the one hand, he achieved an enormous popularity with a wide audience, largely through his more emotional works; on the other, the almost hypnotic effect that he was able to induce led to serious questioning of his true musical quality.
He is certainly the greatest master of the classical ballet. The symphonies may be variable in quality, but all contain important music. The last three are deservedly famous, though to these should be added the neglected Manfred Symphony. The First Piano Concerto and the Violin Concerto deserve a higher reputation than vehicles for virtuosity. Notable among his other orchestral works are the early Romeo and Juliet Overture and the exquisite Serenade for Strings. Of the operas, Eugene Onegin is a masterpiece and The Queen of Spades dramatically effective. His string quartets are excellent, but his piano music is largely undistinguished.
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