Birth

7th May 1840 Votkinsk, Russia

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Death

6th November 1893 St Petersburg, Russia aged 53

 

Musical era

Romantic

 

Family

Second of six surviving children of an engineer father and a mother of French descent. At the age of four, he composed a song with his sister and at five years he started taking piano lessons. From ten, he spent nine years at a boarding school and during this time his mother died of cholera and his father realised that a career in the civil service wouldn’t suit his son so employed a piano teacher.

 

Important points from his life

In 1862, he became one of the first students of the newly founded St Petersburg Conservatory and after graduating, taught at the Moscow Conservatory. Within five years, he had composed his first symphony.

He was fleetingly engaged to a mezzo-soprano in 1868, had a failed marriage and was privately homosexual. His suffered from depression and personal crises throughout his life.

 

Best known pieces

• Swan Lake

• The Nutcracker

• 1812 Overture

• Eugene Onegin

• Piano Concerto No 1

• Violin Concerto in D (he only wrote one)

• Symphony No 6 Pathetique

 

 

 

What has been said

Co-founder of the Russian Music Society Anton Rubinstein called Tchaikovsky ‘a composer of genius.’

‘Music is indeed the most beautiful of all Heaven's gifts to humanity wandering in the darkness. Alone it calms, enlightens, and stills our souls.’ Tchaikovsky

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