Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky^† (Russian: Пётр Ильич Чайковский) (7 May 1840 [O.S. 25 April] – 6 November 1893 [O.S. 25 October])^†† was a Russian composer of the Romantic era. He wrote some of the most popular concert and theatrical music in the current classical repertoire, including the ballets Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, the 1812 Overture, his First Piano Concerto, several symphonies, and the opera Eugene Onegin.

Born into a middle-class family, Tchaikovsky's education prepared him for a career as a civil servant, despite the musical precocity he had demonstrated from an early age. Against the wishes of his family he chose to pursue a musical career, and in 1862 entered the

As his style developed, Tchaikovsky wrote music across a range of genres, including symphony, opera, ballet, instrumental, chamber and song. Although he enjoyed many popular successes, he was never emotionally secure, and his life was punctuated by personal crises and periods of depression. Contributory factors were his suppressed homosexuality and fear of exposure, his disastrous marriage, and the sudden collapse of the one enduring relationship of his adult life, his 13-year association with the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck. Amid private turmoil Tchaikovsky's public reputation grew; he was honoured by the Tsar, awarded a lifetime pension and lauded in the concert halls of the world. His sudden death at the age of 53 is generally ascribed to cholera, but some attribute it to suicide.^[1]

Although enduringly popular with concert audiences across the world, Tchaikovsky has at times been judged harshly by critics, musicians and composers. However, his reputation as a significant composer is now generally regarded as secure,^[2] the disdain with which Western critics in the early and mid-20th century dismissed his music as vulgar and lacking in elevated thought having largely dissipated.^[3]

Life

Childhood

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in

In 1843 Tchaikovsky's parents hired a French governess, Fanny Dürbach. Her love and affection for her charge is said to have provided a counter to Alexandra, who is described by one biographer as a cold, unhappy, distant parent not given to displays of physical affection.[5] However, other writers claim that Alexandra doted on her son.^[6]

Tchaikovsky began piano lessons at the age of four. A precocious pupil, he could read music as well as his teacher within three years. However, his parents' passion for his musical talent soon cooled. In 1850, the family decided to send Tchaikovsky to the

On June 25, 1854 Tchaikovsky suffered the shock of his mother Alexandra's death from

Tchaikovsky graduated on May 25, 1859 with the rank of titular counselor, the lowest rung on the civil service ladder. On June 15, he was appointed to the Ministry of Justice. Six months later he became a junior assistant and two months after that, a senior assistant. There Tchaikovsky remained for the rest of his three-year civil service career.^[15]

In 1861, he attended classes in music theory organized by the Russian Musical Society (RMS) and taught by Nikolai Zaremba. A year later he followed Zaremba to the new St Petersburg Conservatory. Tchaikovsky would not give up his Ministry post "until I am quite certain that I am destined to be a musician rather than a civil servant."^[16] From 1862 to 1865 he studied harmony, counterpoint and fugue with Zaremba, while Anton Rubinstein, director and founder of the Conservatory, taught him instrumentation and composition.^[17] In 1863 he abandoned his civil service career and studied music full-time, graduating in December 1865. Rubinstein was impressed by Tchaikovsky's musical talent, but this did not stop either him or Zaremba from later clashes with the young composer over his First Symphony, written after his graduation, when he submitted it to them for their perusal. The symphony was given its first complete performance in Moscow in February 1868, where it was well received.^[18]

Relationship with The Five

Rubinstein's western musical orientation brought him the opposition of the nationalistic group of musicians known as "The Five". As Rubinstein's best-known pupil, Tchaikovsky was treated as a natural target for attack by the group, especially as fodder for César Cui's criticism.^[19] This attitude changed slightly when Rubinstein left the St. Petersburg musical scene in 1867. In 1869 Tchaikovsky entered into a working relationship with composer Mily Balakirev, leader of The Five; the result was Tchaikovsky's first recognised masterpiece, the fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet, a work which The Five wholeheartedly embraced.^[20] He remained friendly but never intimate with most of The Five, ambivalent about their music; their goals and aesthetics did not match his.^[21] He took pains to ensure his musical independence from them as well as from the conservative faction at the St. Petersburg Conservatory—a course of action facilitated by his acceptance of a professorship at the Moscow Conservatory offered to him by Nikolai Rubinstein.^[22]

Mature composer

Tchaikovsky combined his professorial duties with

The writer Alexander Poznansky showed through his research that Tchaikovsky had homosexual tendencies and that some of the composer's closest relationships were with persons of the same sex. Tchaikovsky's servant Aleksei Sofronov and the composer's nephew, Vladimir "Bob" Davydov, have been cited as romantic interests.[26]

More controversial is how comfortable Tchaikovsky might have been with his sexual nature. After reading all Tchaikovsky's letters (including unpublished ones), Poznansky concludes that the composer "eventually came to see his sexual peculiarities as an insurmountable and even natural part of his personality ... without experiencing any serious psychological damage."^[27] Relevant portions of his brother Modest's autobiography, where he tells of his brother's sexual orientation, have also been published.^[28] Some letters previously suppressed by Soviet censors, where Tchaikovsky openly speaks out about his homosexuality, have been published in Russian, as well as by Poznansky in English translation.^[29] However, biographer Anthony Holden claims British musicologist and scholar Henry Zajaczkowski's research "along psychoanalytical lines" points instead to "a severe unconscious inhibition by the composer of his sexual feelings":

One consequence of it may be sexual overindulgence as a kind of false solution: the individual thereby persuades himself that he does accept his sexual impulses. Complementing this and, also, as a psychological defense mechanism, would be precisely the idolization by Tchaikovsky of many of the young men of his circle [the self-styled "Fourth Suite"], to which Poznansky himself draws attention. If the composer's response to possible sexual objects was either to use and discard them or to idolize them, it shows that he was unable to form an integrated, secure relationship with another man. That, surely, was [Tchaikovsky's] tragedy.^[30]

In the

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 quodition. 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 humor than of secret meaning.^[31]

Wiley adds, "Amateurish criticism to the contrary, there is no warrant to assume, this period [of his short-lived marriage] excepted, that Tchaikovsky's sexuality ever deeply impaired his inspiration, or made his music idiosyncratically confessional or incapable of philosophical utterance."^[31]

Turmoil in life and music

In 1868, Tchaikovsky met the Belgian soprano Désirée Artôt, then on a tour of Russia. They became infatuated, and were engaged to be married.^[32] He dedicated his Romance in F minor for piano, Op. 5, to her. However, on September 15, 1868, without any communication with Tchaikovsky (as the social conventions of the time would have demanded), Artôt married a member of her company, the Spanish baritone Mariano Padilla y Ramos. The general view has been that Tchaikovsky got over the affair fairly quickly. It has, however, been postulated that he coded her name into the Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor and the tone-poem Fatum^[33] They met on a handful of later occasions, and in October 1888 he wrote Six French Songs, Op. 65, for her, in response to her request for a single song. Tchaikovsky later claimed she was the only woman he ever loved.^[34]

In April 1877 Tchaikovsky's favorite pupil, Vladimir Shilovsky, had married suddenly.^[35][36] Shilovsky's wedding may, in turn, have spurred Tchaikovsky to consider such a step himself.^[37] He declared his intention to marry in a letter to his brother.^[38] There followed Tchaikovsky's ill-starred marriage to one of his former composition students, Antonina Miliukova. The brief time with his wife drove him to an emotional crisis, which was followed by a stay in Clarens, Switzerland, for rest and recovery.^[39] They remained legally married but never lived together again nor had any children, though she later gave birth to three children by another man.^[40]

Tchaikovsky's marital débacle may have forced him to face the full truth concerning his sexuality.^[41] He apparently never again considered matrimony as a camouflage or escape, nor considered himself capable of loving women in the same manner as men. ^[41] He wrote to his brother Anatoly from Florence, Italy on February 19, 1878,

Thanks to the regularity of my life, to the sometimes tedious but always inviolable calm, and above all, thanks to time whch heals all wounds, I have completely recovered from my insanity. There's no doubt that for some months on end I was a bit insane, and only now, when I'm completely recovered, have I learned to relate objectively to everything which I did during my brief insanity. That man who in May took it into his head to marry A[ntonina] I[vanova], who during June wrote a whole opera as though nothing had happened, who in July married, who in September fled from his wife, who in November railed at Rome and so on—that man wasn't I, but another Pyotr Ilyich.^[42]

A few days later, in another letter to Anatoly, he added that there was "nothing more futile than wanting to be anything other than what I am by nature."^[43]

The strain of the marriage may have actually enhanced Tchaikovsky's creativity. The Fourth Symphony and the opera Eugene Onegin, arguably two of his finest compositions,^[44] could be considered proof of this.^[44] He finished both these works in the six months between his engagement and the completion of the rest cure following his marriage breakdown. While in Clarens he also composed his Violin Concerto, with the technical assistance of one of his former students, violinist Yosif Kotek, who would later help establish contact between Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meck, the widow of a railway magnate. She would later become the composer's patron and confidante.^[45]

Like the First Piano Concerto, the Violin Concerto was rejected initially by its intended dedicatee, in this case the noted virtuoso and pedagogue Leopold Auer. It was premiered by another soloist (Adolph Brodsky), and while the work would eventually enjoy public success, the audience hissed at its premiere in Vienna,^[46] and it was denigrated by music critic Eduard Hanslick:

The Russian composer Tchaikovsky is surely no ordinary talent, but rather, an inflated one, obsessed with posturing as a man of genius, and lacking all discrimination and taste .... the same can be said for his new, long, and ambitious Violin Concerto. For a while it proceeds soberly, musically, and not mindlessly, but soon vulgarity gains the upper hand and dominates until the end of the first movement. The violin is no longer played: it is tugged about, torn, beaten black and blue.... The Adagio is well on the way to reconciling us and winning us over when, all too soon, it breaks off to make way for a finale that transports us to the brutal and wretched jollity of a Russian church festival. We see a host of gross and savage faces, hear crude curses, and smell the booze. In the course of a discussion of obscener illustrations,

Friedrich Vischer once maintained that there were pictures whose stink one could see. Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto confronts us for the first time with the hideous idea that there may be musical compositions whose stink one can hear.^[47]

Auer belatedly accepted the concerto, and eventually played it to great public success. In future years he would teach this work to his pupils, including Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein. Auer later said that Hanslick's comment that "the last movement was redolent of vodka [...] did credit neither to his good judgment nor to his reputation as a critic."^[48]

The intensity of personal emotion now flowing through Tchaikovsky's works was entirely new to Russian music.

Tchaikovsky's fame among concert audiences began to expand outside Russia, and continued to grow within it. Hans von Bülow had become a fervent champion of the composer's work after hearing some of it in a Moscow concert during Lent of 1874.[51] In a German newspaper later that year, he praised the First String Quartet, Romeo and Juliet and other works, and he would later take up many other Tchaikovsky works both as pianist and conductor.^[51] In France, Camille Benoit began introducing Tchaikovsky's music to readers of the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris. The music also received significant exposure during the 1878 International Exhibition in Paris. While Tchaikovsky's reputation as a composer grew, a corresponding increase in performances of his works did not occur until he began conducting them himself, starting in the mid-1880s.^[51] Nevertheless, by 1880, all of the operas Tchaikovsky had completed up that point had been staged, and his orchestral works had been given performances that had been sympathetically received.^[52]

Nadezhda von Meck

Nadezhda von Meck was the wealthy widow of a Russian railway tycoon and an influential patron of the arts. Having heard of Tchaikovsky through Kotek, she wanted to commission some chamber pieces from him. Her support became an important element in Tchaikovsky's life; she eventually paid him an annual subsidy of 6,000 rubles, which made it possible for him to resign from the Moscow Conservatory in October 1878 and concentrate on composition.^[53] With von Meck's patronage came a relationship that, at her insistence, was mainly epistolary – she stipulated they were never to meet face to face. They exchanged well over 1,000 letters between 1877 and 1890. In these letters Tchaikovsky was more open about much of his life and his creative processes than he had been to any other person.^[54]

As well as being a dedicated supporter of Tchaikovsky's musical works, von Meck became a vital enabler in his day-to-day existence.^[55] As he explained to her,

There is something so special about our relationship that it often stops me in my tracks with amazement. I have told you more than once, I believe, that you have come to seem to me the hand of Fate itself, watching over me and protecting me. The very fact that I do not know you personally, while feeling so close to you, accords you in my eyes the special status of an unseen but benevolent presence, like a benign Providence.^[56]

In 1884 Tchaikovsky and von Meck became related by marriage when one of her sons, Nikolay, married Tchaikovsky's niece Anna Davydova.^[57] However, in 1890 von Meck suddenly ended the relationship. She was suffering from health problems that made writing difficult; there were family pressures, and also financial difficulties arising from the mismanagement of her estate by her son Vladimir.^[58] The break with Tchaikovsky was announced in a letter delivered by a trusted servant, rather than by the usual postal service. It contained a request that he not forget her, and was accompanied by a year's subsidy in advance. She claimed bankruptcy, which, if not literally true, was evidently a real threat at the time.^[59]

Tchaikovsky may have been aware for nearly a year of his patroness's financial difficulties.^[60] This did not stop him from continuing to take his allowance for granted (with regular protestations of his eternal gratitude), nor did he offer to return the advance he had received with the farewell letter. Despite his growing celebrity throughout Europe, von Meck's allowance still made up a third of the composer's income.^[60] While he may have no longer needed her money as much as in the past, the loss of her friendship and encouragement was devastating; he remained bewildered and resentful about her abrupt disappearance for the remaining three years of his life.^[61]

Years of wandering

Tchaikovsky returned to Moscow Conservatory in the autumn of 1879, having been away from Russia for a year after the disintegration of his marriage. However, he quickly resigned, settling in Kamenka yet travelling incessantly.^[62] During these years, assured of a regular income from von Meck, he wandered around Europe and rural Russia, never staying long in any one place and living mainly alone, avoiding social contact whenever possible.^[62] This may have been due in part to troubles with Antonina, who would alternately agree to, then refuse, divorce, at one point exacerbating matters by moving into an apartment directly above her husband's.^[63] Tchaikovsky listed Antonina's accusations to him in detail to Modest: "I am a deceiver who married her in order to hide my true nature ... I insulted her every day, her sufferings at my hands were great ... she is appalled by my shameful vice, etc., etc." It is possible that he lived the rest of his life in dread of Antonina's power to expose publicly his sexual leanings.^[64] These factors may explain why, except for the piano trio which he wrote upon the death of Nikolai Rubinstein, his best work from this period is found in genres which did not depend heavily on personal expression.^[63]

While Tchaikovsky's reputation grew rapidly outside Russia, it was, as

In 1880 the

On March 23, 1881, Nikolai Rubinstein died in Paris. Tchaikovsky was holidaying in Rome, and he went immediately to attend the funeral in Paris for his greatly respected mentor, but arrived too late (although he was part of a group of people who saw Rubinstein's coffin off on a train back to Russia).[69] In December, he started work on his Piano Trio in A minor, "dedicated to the memory of a great artist."^[70] The trio was first performed privately at the Moscow Conservatory, where Rubinstein had been director, on the first anniversary of his death by three of its staff—pianist Sergei Taneyev, violinist Jan Hřímalý and cellest Wilhelm Fitzenhagen.^[71] The piece became extremely popular during the composer's lifetime and, in an ironic twist of fate, would become Tchaikovsky's own elegy when played at memorial concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg in November 1893.^[72]

Return to Russia

During 1884 Tchaikovsky began to shed his unsociability and restlessness. In March of that year

In 1885, Tchaikovsky resettled in Russia. The Tsar asked personally for a new production of Eugene Onegin to be staged in St. Petersburg. The opera had previously been seen only in Moscow, produced by a student ensemble from the Conservatory. Though critical reception to the St. Petersburg production of Onegin was negative, the opera drew full houses every night; 15 years later the composer's brother Modest identified this as the moment Tchaikovsky became known and appreciated by the masses, achieving the greatest degree of popularity ever accorded to a Russian composer. News of the opera's success spread, and the work was produced by opera houses throughout Russia and abroad.^[76]

A feature of the St. Petersburg production of Onegin was that Alexander III requested that the opera be staged not at the

Tchaikovsky died in St. Petersburg on November 6, 1893, nine days after the premiere of his Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique. He was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, near the graves of fellow-composers Alexander Borodin, Mikhail Glinka, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Mily Balakirev and Modest Mussorgsky.^[84] Because of the Pathétique's formal innovation and the overwhelming emotional content of its outer movements, the work was received by the public with silent incomprehension at its first performance.^[85] The second performance, led by Nápravník, took place 20 days later at a memorial concert^[86] and was much more favorably received.^[87] The Pathétique has since become one of Tchaikovsky's best known works.

Tchaikovsky's death has traditionally been attributed to cholera, most probably contracted through drinking contaminated water several days earlier.^[88] However, some have theorized that his death was suicide. According to one variation of the theory, a sentence of suicide was imposed in a "court of honor" by Tchaikovsky's fellow alumni of the St. Petersburg School of Jurisprudence, as a censure of the composer's homosexuality. This theory was first broached publicly by Russian musicologist Alexandra Orlova in 1979, when she emigrated to the West.^[1] Wiley writes in the New Grove (2001), "The polemics over [Tchaikovsky's] death have reached an empasse ... Rumor attached to the famous die hard ... As for illness, problems of evidence offer little hope of satisfactory resolution: the state of diagnosis; the confusion of witnesses; disregard of long-term effects of smoking and alcohol. We do not know how Tchaikovsky died. We may never find out...."^[89]

Music

Tchaikovsky wrote many works which are popular with the classical music public, including his

Tchaikovsky's formal conservatory training allowed him to write works with Western oriented attitudes and techniques. His music showcases a wide range and breadth of technique, from a poised "Classical" form simulating 18th century Rococo elegance, to a style more characteristic of Russian nationalists, or (according to Brown) a musical idiom expressly to channel his own overwrought emotions.^[93] Despite his reputation as a "weeping machine,"^[94] self-expression was not a central principle for Tchaikovsky. In a letter to von Meck dated December 5, 1878, he explained there were two kinds of inspiration for a symphonic composer, a subjective and an objective one, and that program music could and should exist, just as it was impossible to demand that literature make do without the epic element and limit itself to lyricism alone. Correspondingly, the large scale orchestral works Tchaikovsky composed can be divided into two categories—symphonies in one category, and other works such as symphonic poems in the other.^[95] According to musicologist Francis Maes, program music such as Francesca da Rimini or the Manfred Symphony was as much a part of the composer's artistic credo as the expression of his "lyric ego."^[96] Maes also identifies a group of compositions which fall outside the dichotomy of program music versus "lyrical ego," where he hearkens toward pre-Romantic aesthetics. Works in this group include the four orchestral suites, Capriccio Italien, the Violin Concerto and the Serenade for Strings.^[97]

Reception and reputation

Although Tchaikovsky's music has always been popular with audiences, it has at times been judged harshly by musicians and composers. However, his reputation as a significant composer is now generally regarded as secure.^[2] His music has won a significant following among concert audiences that is second only to the music of Beethoven,^[3] thanks in large part to what Harold C. Schonberg terms "a sweet, inexhaustible, supersensuous fund of melody ... touched with neuroticism, as emotional as a scream from a window on a dark night."^[98] According to Wiley, this combination of supercharged melody and surcharged emotion polarized listeners, with popular appeal of Tchaikovsky's music counterbalanced by critical disdain of it as vulgar and lacking in elevated thought or philosophy.^[3] More recently, Tchaikovsky's music has received a professional reevaluation, with musicians reacting more favorably to its tunefulness and craftsmanship.^[94]

Public considerations

Tchaikovsky believed that his professionalism in combining skill and high standards in his musical works separated him from his contemporaries in The Five. He shared several of their ideals, including an emphasis on national character in music. His aim, however, was to link those ideals to a standard high enough to satisfy Western European criteria. His professionalism also fueled his desire to reach a broad public, not just nationally but internationally, which he would eventually do.^[99]

He may also have been influenced by the almost "eighteenth-century" patronage prevalent in Russia at the time, which was still strongly influenced by its aristocracy. In this style of patronage, the patron and the artist often met on equal terms. Dedications of works to patrons were not gestures of humble gratitude but expressions of artistic partnership. The dedication of the Fourth Symphony to von Meck is known to be a seal on their friendship. Tchaikovsky's relationship with Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich bore creative fruit in the Six Songs, Op. 63, for which the grand duke wrote the words.^[100] Tchaikovsky found no aesthetic conflict in playing to the tastes of his audiences, though it was never established that he satisfied any other tastes but his own. The patriotic themes and stylization of 18th-century melodies in his works lined up with the values of the Russian aristocracy.^[101]

Compositional style

Music samples

Twelve Pieces for piano

Opus 40, for piano

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Romeo and Juliet Overture

Performed by the Skidmore College Orchestra, courtesy of Musopen

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1812 Overture

Performed by the Skidmore College Orchestra. Courtesy of Musopen

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Problems playing these files? See media help.

According to Brown in the New Grove (1980), Tchaikovsky's melodies ranged "from Western style to folksong stylizations and occasionally folksongs themselves."

Wiley cites Tchaikovsky as "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 unified the symphonic thought of Beethoven and Schumann with the works of Glinka, and transformed Liszt's and Berlioz's achievements in depictive-programmatic music into matters of Shakespearian elevation and psychological import."^[103]

Tchaikovsky felt his professionalism in combining skill and high standards in his musical works separated him from his colleagues in "The Five." He shared several of their ideals, including an emphasis on national character in music. His aim, however, was linking those ideals with a professional standard for structural perfection high enough to satsify European criteria.

Tchaikovsky's professionalism also fueled his desire to reach a broad public, not just nationally but also internationally. He eventually reached just such an audience.[104] Russian musicologist Solomon Volkov maintains that Tchaikovsky was perhaps the first Russian composer to think seriously about his country's place in European musical culture.^[106] As the composer wrote to von Meck from Paris,

How pleasant it is to be convinced firsthand of the success of our literature in France. Every book étalage displays translations of Tolstoy, Turgenev, and Dostoevsky.... The newspapers are constantly printing rapturous articles about one or another of these writers. Perhaps such a time will come for Russian music as well!^[107]

Tchaikovsky became the first Russian composer to personally acquaint foreign audiences with his own works, as well as those of other Russian composers.^[108] He also formed close business and personal ties with many of the leading musicians of Europe and the United States. For Russians, Volkov asserts, this was all something new and unusual.^[109]

Finally, the impact of Tchaikovsky's own works, especially in ballet, cannot be underestimated; his mastery of danseuse (melodies which match physical movements perfectly), along with vivid orchestration, effective themes and continuity of thought were unprecedented in the genre,^[110] setting new standards for the role of music in classical ballet.^[111] Noel Goodwin characterized Swan Lake as "one of [ballet's] enduring masterworks"^[111] and The Sleeping Beauty as "the supreme example of 19th century classical ballet,"^[112] while Wiley called the latter work "powerful, diverse and rhythmically complex."^[113]

Notes

† The subject's names are also transliterated Piotr, Petr, or Peter; Ilitsch, Ilich, Il'ich or Illyich; and Tschaikowski, Tschaikowsky, Chajkovskij and Chaikovsky (and other versions; Russian transliteration can vary between languages). The Library of Congress standardized the usage Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky.

†† Russia was still using

old style dates

in the 19th century, and information sources used in the article sometimes report dates as old style rather than new style. Dates in the article are taken verbatim from the source and therefore are in the same style as the source from which they come.

††† This celebration did not take place as Alexander II was assassinated in March 1881.

References

Further reading

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

Wikimedia Commons has media related to Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.

• Tchaikovsky Research (active site)
• Istituto Musicale Tchaikovsky (Italy) (active site)
• Tchaikovsky (inactive site)
• PBS Great Performances biography of Tchaikovsky
• (Italian) Tchaikovsky: listen a playlist on Magazzini-Sonori
• Biography of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky at the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts
• Tchaikovsky cylinder recordings, from the
  Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project at the University of California, Santa Barbara
  Library.

• www.kreusch-sheet-music.net Free Scores by Tchaikovsky
• Mutopia Project Tchaikovsky Sheet Music at Mutopia
• Free scores by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky at the International Music Score Library Project (IMSLP)

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