"Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893, the most famous Russian composer started his career as a government clerk and began to study music theory at the relatively late age of twenty-one. His progress in music was rapid, however. After graduating from the St. Petersburg conservatory, he became a professor of harmony at the Moscow Conservatory and composed furiously: a symphony, an opera, a tone poem and--by the age of thirty--his first great orchestral work, Romeo and Juliet.
"The year 1877 was dramatic for Tchaikovsky. He married, disastrously and apparently only to conceal his homosexuality; attempted suicide two weeks after the wedding; and had a nervous collapse. (He and his wife separated and never saw each other again.) But in 1877 he also acquired a wealthy benefactress, Nadexdha von Meck, with whom he had a curious but intimate friendship--they corresponded but did not meet. Madame von Meck gave him an annuity that allowed him to leave the conservatory and devote himself to composition; fourteen years later, he was deeply hurt when she cut off the and stopped writing to him.
"During these years, Tchiakovsky achieved success conducting his own works throughout Europe (and, in 1893) in the United States), but he always remained a spiritually troubled man. In 1893, nine days after conducting the premiere of his Symphony No. 6 (Pathetique)--which ends unconventionally with a slow, despairing finale--he died at the age of fifty-three.
Tchaikovsky's Music
"Tchaikovsky thought of himself as "Russian in the fullest sense of the word," but his style was influenced by French, Italian, and German music as well as Russian folksong. His works are much more in the western tradition than those of his contemporaries, the Russian Five. He fused national and international elements to produce intensely subjective and passionate music.
"Among his most popular orchestral compositions are Symphonies No. 4 (1877), No. 5 (1888), and No. 6 (Pathetique, 1893); Piano Concerto No. 1 in B Flat Minor (1875); the Violin Concerto (1878); and the overture--fantasy Romeo and Juliet, which we'll study. He wrote some of the best scores for ballet--Swan Lake (1876), The Sleeping Beauty (1889), and The Nutcracker (1892)--and the spirit of ballet permeates much of his music. He also wrote eight operas and the orchestral showpieces Marche slave and Overture 1812."
The above is from Music an Appreciation by Roger Kamien, Third Brief Edition, McGraw Hill Companies, Inc. Pages 253.
