3. First decade in Moscow, 1866–76.

In September 1865 Nikolay Rubinstein, Anton's brother, came to St Petersburg to recruit a theory teacher for music classes in Moscow similar to those Anton had organized in St Petersburg. Tchaikovsky was offered the position, and with it a place to live in Nikolay's quarters. He moved to Moscow in January 1866; in September the Moscow Conservatory opened. Important in the following decade were the securing of Tchaikovsky's professional status, his adjustment to life in Moscow, his encounter with Balakirev and the nationalists, and, as a composer, his embrace of every important musical genre.

In Moscow Tchaikovsky made significant friends. First among them was Nikolay Rubinstein, who placed himself and the orchestra of the Moscow branch of the Russian Musical Society at the composer's service. Tireless activist, magnificent pianist, beloved in Moscow, Rubinstein could also be despotic and unscrupulous. Among his lieutenants Pyotr Jürgenson was Tchaikovsky's principal publisher and lifetime provider of financial support; Nikolay Kashkin, a conservatory professor whom Rubinstein urged to take up music criticism, was Tchaikovsky's staunchest supporter in the press and the author of significant memoirs. Others included the intendant of the conservatory Konstantin Karl Albrecht, the architect Ivan Klimenko, and Tchaikovsky's former classmates Herman Laroche and Nikolay Gubert (Hubert), who soon joined the conservatory staff as well.

In Moscow Tchaikovsky enjoyed social celebrity and lived in a manner befitting his youth. At the Artistic Circle, a club co-founded by Rubinstein, he met the élite of Muscovite literature and theatre. One friend (Klimenko), unfettered by the pieties of official biography, recalled Tchaikovsky as a prankster, lavishly greeting total strangers on the street, improvising jesting verses in a monastery, or dancing and singing the mazurka from Glinka's A Life for the Tsar in a railway carriage, to the shock of some lady passengers.

Yet Tchaikovsky chafed at his living conditions and resented obstacles to composition. For five years he sought quiet elsewhere in the town to escape the pandemonium of Nikolay Rubinstein's home, a veritable hotel and a meeting place for conservatory staff. Financial distress was perpetual, forcing him to supplement his income with translations and arrangements. He was diffident about teaching, which elicited complaints, amid mostly reverential testimony, about the extremity of his demands, his irritability when they were not met and his harsh treatment of women students. Classroom decorum notwithstanding, Tchaikovsky's pedagogy extended to two harmony books, one adapted to Russian church music, and a translation of J.C. Lobe's Katechismus der Musik.

Tchaikovsky's intimate relations during this or any other period evade verification. Much has been supposed about his personal life, ranging, often injudiciously, across parameters of homosexuality versus amorous encounters with women, physical liaison versus emotional attachment, personal impulse versus social dictate, and life versus art. These factors played into Tchaikovsky's courtship of Désirée Artôt, a diva performing in Moscow in 1868, for whom his intentions seemed to have been serious; he proposed, and if his friend de Lazari's memoirs are accurate, he competed with a rival, received Artôt's passionate declaration and chose names for his children. The affair was also reflected in his dedication to Artôt of the Romance op.5.

The expurgation of Tchaikovsky's extant letters and the suppression of others, mostly addressed to Modest, who was homosexual, and Anatoly, who dealt with Pyotr's marital problems, have stimulated conjecture about the composer's sexuality ranging from reasonable inference to completely unfounded fantasy. His resulting reputation as a conflicted sociopath has merit, if at all, on the basis of correspondence from the time of his marriage, when his emotional upheaval was atypically acute. Amateurish criticism to the contrary, there is no warrant to assume, this period excepted, that Tchaikovsky's sexuality ever deeply impaired his inspiration, or made his music idiosyncratically confessional or incapable of philosophical utterance.

Allowing that much remains to be learnt, Tchaikovsky's letters as we have them suggest reasonable conclusions about his sexuality. First, he experienced no unbearable guilt over it, but took its negative social implications seriously. Of special concern was the threat of allusion to it in the press, and the impact this would have on his family. That prospect made him hypersensitive and moody, and may have pressured him to marry. Second, Tchaikovsky expressed the belief that he could function in a heterosexual union even if he had to lead a double life. His willingness to marry was prompted by his father, whom he wanted to please, and would satisfy not only social convention but also his own desire for a permanent home and his love of children and family. Third, the letters and diaries make unabashed if indirect reference to romantic activity. Claims made for these references, including evidence of sexual argot and of passionate encounter, far exceed the limits of the evidence. The first, by implying Tchaikovsky's intent to conceal his sexuality, and the second, by implying that he was promiscuous, have prompted the belief that he suffered neurosis over this matter.

The facts are more quotidian. Tchaikovsky associated openly with the homosexuals in his circle, establishing professional connections and lifelong friendships with some of them, and sought out their company for extended periods. His mode of address was, on occasion, the very antithesis of concealment – the expression more of humour than of secret meaning. What else could explain Klimenko's providing the prudish Modest with a letter in which Tchaikovsky referred to Klimenko, idiomatically feminizing his name, as the choicest of his harem, and to himself as sultan? The allusion is too brazen to be serious.

Tchaikovsky's successes as a composer during this time were hard won and occasional; the chief works of his youth have vanished, are rarely performed, or survive in versions made later, though a number of short pieces achieved popularity. Middling success exacerbated the composer's lifelong sensitivity to criticism. Laroche's reviews of the tone poem Fatum and the opera Voyevoda led to a temporary break in their friendship, not least his remark that the music of Voyevoda bore the stamp of femininity. Nikolay Rubinstein was also a notorious critic, subjecting the composer to what one acquaintance termed irrational fits of rage. But Rubinstein's views were private, and rarely barred performance. Vestiges of apprenticeship are apparent in Tchaikovsky's early Moscow compositions, in his effort to clarify genre, in the revision or the re-use of earlier music and in his need for validation from St Petersburg, which had passed by 1870.

Two early concert overtures, in F major and C minor, point to a fundamental tension in Tchaikovsky's non-programmatic works. His muse too generously provided themes which in striking effect or sheer beauty forestall development. They are ill at ease in structures based on hierarchies of key or theme, where individuality is tolerated provided it yields to the logic of the whole. In these overtures the musical ideas do not yield, but clash with the expectations of received form. His first work performed in Moscow, the Overture in F, is simply fulsome. Tchaikovsky burdens the music with elaboration, pointed by an introduction of 109 bars which overwhelms the sonata-allegro, and a coda of 172 bars almost mirthful in its inability to achieve closure. The tension between arresting beauty and trenchant discourse is perpetual in Tchaikovsky. It made him concede an inability to deal with form, and prompted Soviet analysis to find a virtue in his sonorities and contrasts, alternate rationales of structure which bow to the grand tradition while praising individuality. This tension diminishes in music based on a programme or in the suite, where closely argued discourse is not expected.

(i) Symphonies.

(ii) Programme music.

(iii) String quartets.

(iv) Piano music.

(v) Concertante works.

(vi) Songs.

(vii) Stage works.

(viii) Other works.

Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Il'yich, §3: First decade in Moscow, 1866–76