Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Russian composer
1840 CE to 1893 CE
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893), anglicised as Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky,is a Russian composer whose works include symphonies, concertos, operas, ballets, and chamber music.
Some of these are among the most popular concert and theatrical music in the classical repertoire.
He is the first Russian composer whose music makes a lasting impression internationally, which he bolsters with appearances as a guest conductor later in his career in Europe and the United States.
One of these appearances is at the inaugural concert of Carnegie Hall in New York City in 1891.
Tchaikovsky is honored in 1884 by Tsar Alexander III, and awarded a lifetime pension in the late 1880s.
Although musically precocious, Tchaikovskyis educated for a career as a civil servant.
There is scant opportunity for a musical career in Russia at that time, and no system of public music education.
When an opportunity for such an education arises, he enters the nascent Saint Petersburg Conservatory, from where he graduates in 1865.
The formal Western-oriented teaching he receives there set him apart from composers of the contemporary nationalist movement embodied by the Russian composers of The Five, with whom his professional relationship is mixed.
Tchaikovsky's training sets him on a path to reconcile what he had learned with the native musical practices to which he had been exposed from childhood.
From this reconciliation, he forges a personal, independent but unmistakably Russian style—a task that does not prove easy.
The principles that governs melody, harmony and other fundamentals of Russian music runs completely counter to those that govern Western European music; this seems to defeat the potential for using Russian music in large-scale Western composition or from forming a composite style.
Russian culture exhibits a split personality, with its native and adopted elements having drifted apart increasingly since the time of Peter the Great, and this results in uncertainty among the intelligentsia of the country's national identity.
The principles of Russian nationalist artists are fundamentally at odds with those supporting European traditions, and this causes personal antipathies that dent Tchaikovsky's self-confidence.
Despite his many popular successes, Tchaikovsky's life is punctuated by personal crises and depression.
Contributory factors include his leaving his mother for boarding school, his mother's early death and the collapse of the one enduring relationship of his adult life, his 13-year association with the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck.
His same-sex orientation, which he keeps private, has traditionally also been considered a major factor, but musicologists now play down its importance.
His sudden death at the age of 53 is generally ascribed to cholera; there is an ongoing debate as to whether it was accidental or self-inflicted.
While his music has remained popular among audiences, critical opinions were initially mixed.
Some Russians did not feel it sufficiently representative of native musical values and were suspicious that Europeans accepted it for its Western elements.
In apparent reinforcement of the latter claim, some Europeans lauded Tchaikovsky for offering music more substantive than base exoticism, and thus transcending stereotypes of Russian classical music.
Tchaikovsky's music was dismissed as "lacking in elevated thought," according to longtime New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg, and its formal workings were derided as deficient for not following Western principles stringently.
Vestiges of this last claim still remain in some critical circles, but by the end of the 20th century, Tchaikovsky's status as a significant composer had become secure, with increasing numbers responding positively to its tunefulness and innovation.
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Music by Romantic composers Johannes Brahms, Modesto Mussorgsky and Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky has a similarly dramatic impact.
Brahms, in his dramatic compositions, continues Beethoven’s symphonic tradition, as do Anton Bruckner and Gustav Mahler.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture, written in 1880 to commemorate Russia's defense of their fatherland against Napoleon's invading Grande Armée in 1812, debuts in the Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow on August 20 [O.S. August 8] 1882, conducted by Ippolit Al'tani.
The overture is best known for its climactic volley of cannon fire, ringing chimes, and brass fanfare finale.
Tsar Alexander III requests a new production of Pyotr Tchaikovsky's Eugene Onegin to be staged at the Bolshoi Kamenny Theater in Saint Petersburg in 1885 (Its only other production had been by students from the Conservatory.)
By having the opera staged there and not at the Mariinsky Theater, he serves notice that Tchaikovsky's music is replacing Italian opera as the official imperial art.
In addition, thanks to Ivan Vsevolozhsky, Director of the Imperial Theaters and a patron of the composer, Tchaikovsky is awarded a lifetime annual pension of three thousand rubles from the Tsar.
This makes him the premier court composer, in practice if not in actual title.
Tchaikovsky, forty-four years old in 1884, had begun to shed his unsociability and restlessness.
In March of that year, the Tsar had conferred upon him the Order of St. Vladimir (fourth class), which carries with it hereditary nobility and wins Tchaikovsky a personal audience with the Tsar.
This is a visible seal of official approval which advanced Tchaikovsky's social standing.
This advance may have been cemented in the composer's mind by the great success of his Orchestral Suite No. 3 at its January 1885 premiere in Saint Petersburg, under Hans von Bülow's direction, at which the press was unanimously favorable.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake ballet is premiered by the Bolshoi Ballet on March 4 [O.S. February 20] 1877 at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow, billed as The Lake of the Swans.
Tchaikovsky composed Swan Lake, Op. 20, in 1875–1876.
The scenario, initially in four acts, had been fashioned from Russian folk tales and tells the story of Odette, a princess turned into a swan by an evil sorcerer's curse.
The choreographer of the original production is Julius Reisinger.
The second of his three ballets, the original scenario was conceived by Ivan Vsevolozhsky, and is based on Charles Perrault's La Belle au bois dormant.
The choreographer of the original production is Marius Petipa.
The work will become one of the classical repertoire's most famous ballets.
The Music Hall in New York (later known as Carnegie Hall) has its grand opening and first public performance in 1891.
Although the building has been in use from April 1891, the official opening night is May 5, with a concert conducted by Walter Damrosch and Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Eventually named after Andrew Carnegie, who has funded its construction, it is intended as a venue for the Oratorio Society of New York and the New York Symphony Society, on whose boards Carnegie serves.
Construction began in 1890, and was carried out by Isaac A. Hopper and Company.
Designed by architect William Burnet Tuthill, it remains one of the most prestigious venues in the world for both classical music and popular music.
It is one of the last large buildings in New York built entirely of masonry, without a steel frame (however, when several flights of studio spaces are added to the building near the turn of the 20th century, a steel framework will be erected around segments of the building.)
The exterior is rendered in narrow Roman bricks of a mellow ocher hue, with details in terracotta and brownstone.
The foyer avoids typical nineteenth century Baroque theatrical style with the Florentine Renaissance manner of Filippo Brunelleschi's Pazzi Chapel: white plaster and gray stone form a harmonious system of round-headed arched openings and Corinthian pilasters that support an unbroken cornice, with round-headed lunettes above it, under a vaulted ceiling.
The famous white and gold auditorium interior is similarly restrained.
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky’s “The Nutcracker” premieres at at the Imperial Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg, Russia, on December 18 1892.
A two-act ballet, originally choreographed by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, the libretto is adapted from E. T. A. Hoffmann's story "The Nutcracker and the Mouse King".
Although the original production is not a success, the twenty-minute suite that Tchaikovsky extracts from the ballet is.
However, the complete Nutcracker will enjoyed enormous popularity since the late 1960s and is now performed by countless ballet companies, primarily during the Christmas season, especially in North America.
Major American ballet companies generate around forty percent of their annual ticket revenues from performances of The Nutcracker.
The ballet's score will be used in several film adaptations of Hoffmann's story.
Tchaikovsky's score has become one of his most famous compositions.
Among other things, the score is noted for its use of the celesta, an instrument that the composer had already employed in his much lesser known symphonic ballad The Voyevoda.