Presentation. 6th grade. Petr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is widely considered

as the most popular Russian composer in history.

His work includes the 'The Sleeping Beauty’

and 'The Nutcracker.’

Who Was Tchaikovsky?

Composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's work was first publicly performed in 1865. In 1868, his  First Symphony  was well-received. In 1874,

he established himself with  Piano Concerto No.1 in B-flat Minor . Tchaikovsky resigned from the Moscow Conservatory in 1878 and spent the rest of his career composing yet more prolifically. Tchaikovsky is most celebrated for his ballets, specifically  Swan Lake ,  The Sleeping Beauty  and  The Nutcracker . 

He died in St. Petersburg on November the 6 th , 1893.

Pyotr (Peter) Ilyich Tchaikovsky  was a Russian  composer  of the  Romantic  era. Tchaikovsky is one of the world's most renowned classical music composers, known for his distinctly Russian character

as well as for his rich harmonies

and stirring melodies.

His talent was perhaps too heterogeneous and his stylistic skills overly versatile, which spurred complaints that his music was either too Russian or too European, while it was effectively both; he integrated Russian folk melodies with Western European melodies.

Tchaikovsky's name is most frequently associated with  Swan Lake,   Nutcracker,  and  Capriccio Italien.

Early Years

Pyotr Tchaikovsky was born on April 25 th , 1840—November the 6 th , 1893 by the Julian calendar, or May the 7 th , 1840 — October 25 th , 1893 by the Gregorian calendar in Votkinsk,

a small town in the Vyatka Guberniya, now Udmurtia (a sovereign republic within the Russian Federation) to a mining engineer in the government mines, who had the rank

of major-general, and the second of his three wives, Alexandra, a Russian woman of  French  ancestry.

He was the second eldest of his parents' six surviving offspring.

Tchaikovsky's father, Ilya, worked as a mine inspector and metal works manager.

When he was just five years old, Tchaikovsky began taking piano lessons.

Although he displayed an early passion for music, his parents hoped that he would grow up to work in the civil service.

At the age of 10, Tchaikovsky began attending the Imperial School of Jurisprudence,

a boarding school in St. Petersburg. His mother, Alexandra, died of cholera in 1854, when he was 14 years old. In 1859, Tchaikovsky honored his parents' wishes by taking up a bureau clerk post with the Ministry of Justice — a post he would hold for four years, during which time he became increasingly fascinated with music.

He was some ten years senior of his dramatist, librettist, and translator brother Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky. The family name came from his Kazakh great-grandfather, who could imitate the call of a seagull (a “tchaika” - hence the name Tchaikovsky).

However, the family origins may have been partly  Polish , as Tchaikovsky suggested in

a letter to his benefactress Madame von Meck. The family enjoyed music and listened to  Mozart ,  Rossini ,  Bellini , and  Donizetti  played by a large musical box called orchestrion. Tchaikovsky noted later that he was fortunate not to have been brought up in a very musical family that would spoil him with music imitating  Beethoven .

He received  piano  lessons from a freed  serf , beginning at the age of five, and within a few months he was already proficient in Friedrich Kalkbrenner's composition  Le Fou.

When he was 21, Tchaikovsky decided

to take music lessons

at the Russian Musical Society.

A few months later, he enrolled

at the newly founded St. Petersburg Conservatory, becoming one of the school's first composition students.

In addition to learning while at the conservatory, Tchaikovsky gave private lessons to other students.

In 1863, he moved to Moscow, where

he became a professor

of harmony at the

Moscow Conservatory.

Tchaikovsky's Compositions. Operas

Pyotr Tchaikovsky's work was first publicly performed in 1865, with  Johann Strauss the Younger  conducting Tchaikovsky's  Characteristic Dances  

at a Pavlovsk concert.

In 1868, Tchaikovsky's  First Symphony  was well-received when it was publicly performed in Moscow.

The following year, his first opera, 

The Voyevoda,  made its way to the stage — with little fanfare.

After scrapping  The Voyevoda , Tchaikovsky repurposed some of its material to compose his next opera,  Oprichnik , which achieved

some acclaim when it was performed

at the Maryinsky in St. Petersburg

in 1874. By this time, Tchaikovsky had also earned praise for his 

Second Symphony .

Also in 1874, his opera,  Vakula the Smith , received harsh critical reviews,

yet Tchaikovsky still managed

to establish himself as a talented composer of instrumental pieces with his  Piano Concerto No.1

in B-flat Minor .

Acclaim came readily for Tchaikovsky

in 1875, with his composition  Symphony No. 3 in D Major . At the end of that year, the composer embarked on a tour of Europe. In 1876, he completed the ballet  Swan Lake  as well as the fantasy  Francesca da Rimini .

While the former has come to be one

of the most frequently performed ballets of all time, Tchaikovsky again endured the ire of critics, who at its premiere panned

it as too complex and too "noisy."

Tchaikovsky resigned from the Moscow Conservatory in 1878 to focus his efforts entirely on composing.

As a result, he spent the remainder

of his career composing more prolifically than ever.

His collective body of work constitutes 169 pieces, including symphonies, operas, ballets, concertos,

cantatas and songs.

Among his most famed late works are the ballets  The Sleeping Beauty  (1890) and 

The Nutcracker  (1892).

The composer's lifestyle added to the turbulence and melancholia that was reflected in his works.

Tchaikovsky was not simply tormented,

but also deeply in touch with beauty and deep emotion.

He gave himself to his art and placed it above the twists and turns

of his own existence.

By continually prompting his audiences

to stretch their likings beyond the familiar and easily acceptable, he provided a glimpse of the stage that had not yet been opened—when individuals could go beyond their nationalistic tendencies to embrace the world. His musical rendering of this 'premature' vision was behind the composer's uniqueness and brilliance.

Tchaikovsky's music, drawing on events in his life, forms part of the canon of the Romantic period.

The early works were infused with  Russian  nationalism, as is suggested by the titles of the compositions dating from this period, such as  Little Russian,  

The Voyevoda,   The Oprichnik,  and  Vakula the Smith,  which adopted Russian folk songs and dances. The national element is still palpable in the first act of  Eugene Onegin ; afterward he began dissociating from folk sources toward a more cosmopolitan style and  German   Romanticism .

With his horizon expanded, he set out to supplement

the Russian music with the elements found in the Western world: elegance, sophistication, and good breeding. This naturally met with dogged resistance on the part of the die-hard nationalists, in whose eyes he negated the principles for which they stood. Paradoxically, it was Tchaikovsky who incited interest

in Russian music in the Western world, and he embodies Russian music, including the national tendency toward brooding and melancholia,

which dominated his moods.

As a result of his stylistic evolution, an interesting phenomenon occurred: Russian contemporaries attacked him for being too European, while Europeans criticized him as too Russian—his sentimentality that tends to slide towards bathos; pathos and  pessimism  that sometimes erupt into hysteria, and melancholia bordering on self-pity. Although these are credible accusations to a degree, these ‘despicable’ tools enabled him to convey beauty in sadness. Richard Anthony Leonard characterized Tchaikovsky’s music as: “expressive and communicative

in the highest degree. That it is also comparatively easy to absorb and appreciate should be accounted among its virtues instead of its faults."  

And for those who found his Russian spirit too intense, Tchaikovsky himself had a sharp answer:

"As to the Russian element in my music generally, its melodic and harmonic relation to folk music—

I grew up in a quiet place and was drenched from the earliest childhood with the wonderful beauty

of Russian popular songs.

I am, therefore, passionately devoted to every expression of the Russian spirit.

In brief, I am a Russian, through and through."

To the camp who found him lacking in the Russian element, 

Igor Stravinsky   addressed the following: "Tchaikovsky's music, which does not appear Russian to everybody, is often more profoundly Russian than music which has long since been awarded the facile label of Muscovite picturesqueness.

This music is quite as Russian as  Pushkin 's verse or  Glinka 's song. Whilst not specially cultivating in his art the 'soul of the Russian peasant,' Tchaikovsky drew unconsciously from the true, popular sources of our race." 

Tchaikovsky’s song-writing methods came under the ax of his fellow composers and contemporaries for altering the text of the songs to suit his melody, inadequacy of his musical declamation, carelessness, and outdated techniques.

"The Five's Cesar Cui” was at the helm of these criticisms, and Tchaikovsky's dismissal was very insightful: "Absolute accuracy of musical declamation is a negative quality, and its importance should not be exaggerated.

What does the repetition of words, even of whole sentences, matter? There are cases where such repetitions are completely natural and in harmony with reality. Under the influence of strong emotion a person repeats one and the same exclamation and sentence very often….

But even if that never happened in real life, I should feel no embarrassment in impudently turning my back on 'real' truth in favor of 'artistic' truth."

Tchaikovsky died in 1893 during the cholera epidemic. His death has conventionally been attributed to cholera, although some recent theories suggest the possibly of suicide through arsenic poisoning.

Though a brilliant composer, his life was riddled with sadness.