Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Born

7 May 1840, Votkinsk, Russian Empire

Died

6 November 1893, Saint Petersburg

Life

Tchaikovsky was born on 7 May 1840 in Votkinsk, in Vyatka Province, where his father managed the ironworks. He trained in law, and after graduating from the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in 1859 he worked as a clerk in the Ministry of Justice.

Music won. He was among the first students of the Saint Petersburg Conservatory when it opened in 1862, studying composition with Anton Rubinstein, and in January 1866 he moved to Moscow to teach harmony in the classes that became the Moscow Conservatory, a post he left in 1878. His patron Nadezhda von Meck supported him for nearly fourteen years, almost entirely by letter. In 1891 he travelled to America for the opening of Carnegie Hall and conducted six concerts of his own music.

He died of cholera in Saint Petersburg on 6 November 1893.

Why play Tchaikovsky

His Album for the Young, Op. 39, is 24 simple piano pieces written between May and July 1878 and dedicated to his nephew Vladimir Davydov. Three of them are here: Morning Prayer (No. 1), the March of the Wooden Soldiers (No. 5) and the Old French Song (No. 16).

The Seasons, Op. 37a, came out a month at a time in the Saint Petersburg journal Nuvellist, written between December 1875 and May 1876; April: Snowdrop is the fourth. And his first ballet, Swan Lake, first performed at the Bolshoi Theatre in Moscow in 1877, gives the Neapolitan Dance, built on an Italian folk tune.

When Tchaikovsky lived