The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians. In the 29-volume second edition. Grove Music Online /General Editor – Stanley Sadie. Oxford University Press. 2001.

ROLAND JOHN WILEY

Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Il'yich

(b Kamsko-Votkinsk, Vyatka province, 25 April/7 May 1840; d St Petersburg, 25 Oct/6 Nov 1893). Russian composer. He was the first composer of a new Russian type, fully professional, who firmly assimilated traditions of Western European symphonic mastery; in a deeply original, personal and national style he united the symphonic thought of Beethoven and Schumann with the work of Glinka, and transformed Liszt’s and Berlioz’s achievements in depictive-programmatic music into matters of Shakespearian elevation and psychological import (Boris Asaf'yev).

1. Childhood and youth, 1840–60.

2. Study of music, 1861–5.

3. First decade in Moscow, 1866–76.

4. Marriage and its aftermath, 1877–85.

5. Return to life, 1885–8.

6. Years of valediction, 1889–93.

7. Reception.

WORKS

WRITINGS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

1. Childhood and youth, 1840–60.

Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky was the second son of Il'ya Petrovich Tchaikovsky, a mining engineer, and Aleksandra Andreyevna Tchaikovskaya, born Assier. He was part of a large family, of whom his sister Aleksandra, known as ‘Sasha’ (1842–91, Davïdova by marriage), and twin brothers Anatoly (1850–1915), a jurist, and Modest (1850–1916), a writer, were important in his life. Modest wrote The Life of Pyotr Il'yich Tchaikovsky (1901–03), a fundamental biography which combines extraordinary personal authority with a playwright's flair for theatre and a brother's reluctance to be indiscreet.

Our knowledge of Tchaikovsky's childhood is based on reports of his governess Fanny Dürbach, a handful of letters, and lore collected by Modest. Critical to his first decade were his introduction to music and poetry, and the upheaval of his father's search for a new job, which took the family to Moscow in October 1848, to St Petersburg a month later, and in June 1849 to Alapayevsk, a mining town even further distant than Votkinsk.

Dürbach noted Pyotr's sensitivity to words, calling him ‘le petit Pouchkine’, and that at six he read in French and German. When she left the family in 1848, she kept Pyotr's copybooks: except for two prayers in Russian, Tchaikovsky wrote in French, on secular and metaphysical topics precocious for any child and remarkable for a seven-year-old living in rural Russia at mid-century. Among other projects he wrote a poem, ‘The Heroine of France’, and began a history of Joan of Arc. Dürbach found the young Tchaikovsky endearing if easily offended from benign causes. She told the oft-quoted anecdotes: of Pyotr's kissing the map of Russia and spitting on the rest of Europe except for France, which he covered with his hand; of his upset nerves after long improvisations at the piano; and of his sleeplessness when he could not rid his mind of music.

Modest claimed that Pyotr's milieu stifled his talent; he indicted Dürbach as unmusical and questioned his parents' musical culture. In fact the Tchaikovskys were musically literate, recognized Pyotr's ability, if not what it was to become, and supported it at Votkinsk with a tutor and an orchestrion, a mechanical organ which his father purchased as a conversation piece. Pyotr attributed his worship of Mozart to ‘the sacred delight’ he felt as a child listening to excerpts from Don Giovanni on this instrument.

Aleksandra's lament to Dürbach in 1848 that Pyotr was not what he had been at Votkinsk must be understood in context: in two months he had been uprooted from a happy home, lost a beloved teacher, survived a cholera outbreak and enrolled in the middle of term in a highly competitive school. It was winter, and on top of it all Pyotr was studying the piano. He soon fell ill. Aleksandra's report from Alapayevsk that Pyotr was unrecognizable, lazy and vexatious also gives one pause, refuted by Pyotr's own letters, earnest and lacking any hint of sickliness for a child who had just spent nine months recovering from the measles.

While Alapayevsk may have paled before Votkinsk – which had attracted lively commerce, occupied a beautiful setting and found the Tchaikovskys at the centre of a varied social life – two events lightened Pyotr's 14 months in his new home: the birth of twin brothers in May 1850, ‘angels who have come down to earth’, and the arrival of a new governess, Anastasya Petrovna Petrova. She prepared Pyotr to enter school, for which he dedicated to her his first surviving music, the ‘Anastasya Waltz’, in 1854.

Three months after giving birth to the twins, Aleksandra took Pyotr to St Petersburg. He was to be placed in the Mining Corps, but this choice yielded to the School of Jurisprudence, where, too young to enter the school, he spent two years in a preparatory course. In Modest's telling, Pyotr's parting with his mother on this occasion was traumatic: at the Central Turnpike, he was forcibly wrested from his mother's arms, and attempted to stop her carriage as its horses galloped away. The myth of heroic suffering pre-empts any mitigation: that the parent of a sensitive child might avoid farewells in the middle of a public thoroughfare, and that Pyotr was being left to cope alone with schooling similar to that in which he had fallen ill the year before.

Tchaikovsky attended the School of Jurisprudence from August 1852 until May 1859. Our knowledge of his stay comes from his own account, from school records, and from Modest, who solicited reminiscences from Pyotr's classmates and who could speak about life there on his own authority. We know something of his subjects, grades, teachers and friends. Tchaikovsky's classmates recalled him as capable, well-liked, absentminded, and compliant with rules in a rulebound institution except for smoking, to which he became addicted for life at the age of 14.

Modest's remark that Pyotr's stay at the school was an episode only obliquely influential on the principal direction of his life underestimates its significance. The school was the setting of Pyotr's self-discovery, a point Modest ignores by dwelling exclusively on his brother's professional formation. Yet there can be little doubt that several dozen boys cohabiting into adolescence will produce a variety of responses to the emergent libido. Tchaikovsky surely took his rites of passage, but nothing about them can be specified.

The death of Aleksandra Tchaikovskaya on 13/25 June 1854 is obscure. Modest took fewer words to describe her passing than her parting with Pyotr four years earlier, and omitted from The Life data which suggested that Pyotr was not present when his mother died, and lapsed into near madness when he found out. Nor did Modest explain why his principal source, a letter from Pyotr to Dürbach reporting the death, was written two and a half years later. In only three of more than 5000 extant letters did Pyotr revisit this topic, once on the 25th anniversary of his mother's death, when he remarked that the cholera which took her life was ‘complicated by another disease’.

Aleksandra's death brought changes in the family. Il'ya placed some of his children in boarding schools, and invited his brother to St Petersburg to join families under one roof, an arrangement that lasted until 1857. In the spring of 1858 Il'ya lost his savings in a bad investment and was forced, at 67, to find work again after two retirements. That autumn he was appointed director of the Technological Institute in St Petersburg.

Modest's claim that Pyotr's education coincided with the stagnation of his musical gift is disputable. The School of Jurisprudence sponsored concerts by first-rate musicians, provided instruction in singing and instrumental music and gave students access to concerts and opera in St Petersburg. Tchaikovsky studied choral singing there with Gavriil Lomakin, a recognized specialist; he was a soloist in important church services and precentor of the choir for a time. He also wrote literature, pondered the composition of an opera, Hyperbole (in 1854), and composed, in his later student years, his first surviving song, Moy geniy, moy angel, moy drug, (‘My Genius, My Angel, My Friend’), to words by Fet.

Outside the school Tchaikovsky's musical training was encouraged by his maternal aunt, with whom he studied Don Giovanni and other operas, by lessons with the singing teacher Luigi Piccioli and with the piano virtuoso Rudolf Kündinger, who later admitted that he saw no greatness in Pyotr at the time. If musicians such as Lomakin and Kündinger saw nothing extraordinary in Tchaikovsky, neither did the composer's classmates, embarrassed in retrospect at that judgment. Modest wrote that the thought of composing gave Pyotr no rest when he was at school, though he rarely spoke of it, and never recorded his improvisations.

Tchaikovsky graduated from the School of Jurisprudence on 29 May/10 June 1859 and was assigned to the Ministry of Justice five days later. It was no particular occasion: in Modest's phrase, nothing began with it, and nothing ended. Based on the frequency of his promotions – three in eight months – Pyotr took his work seriously, though later he did not remember much of office life. Modest dubs as legend the story that during a conversation Pyotr chewed up an official document, making necessary its redrafting.

Work paled before play. Tchaikovsky's social life after graduation flourished at the French theatre, ballet, Italian opera and amateur theatricals. His life at home changed when Sasha married Lev Davïdov in November 1860 and moved to Kamenka in the Ukraine, leaving Pyotr to mentor Anatoly and Modest. As translator to one of his father's business associates, Tchaikovsky toured western Europe between July and September 1861. It was the first of eight such journeys before the extended wanderlust after his marriage. Whether spurred by work or family business, these trips showed the young civil servant avid for travel, and affirmed his ties with European culture.

One can only guess how Tchaikovsky the socialite would have ended up without the developments in music pedagogy taking shape around him. The Russian Musical Society was formed in 1859 as a concert-giving organization; it soon undertook to offer music classes to the general public, first given in the spring of 1860.