He was born at Votkinsk, in the government of
Vyatka, Russia, May7, 1840, second in a family of five sons
(two last ones twins, whom he loved as if he had been their
father) and one daughter, to whom he was tenderly devoted.
Once in his early teens when he was in school at St.
Petersburg and his mother started to drive to another city, he
had to be held back while she got into the carriage, and the
moment he was free ran and tried to hold the wheels.

There is an anecdote of Tchaikovsky's earliest years that
gives us a clue to the paradox of his personality.
Passionately kissing the map of
Russia and then, one regrets to
state, spitting on the other
countries, he was reminded by his
nurse that she herself was French.
"Yes," he said, accepting her
criticism with perfect sweetness
and affectionate docility, "I
covered France with my hand."
The child is father of the man; here
we have already Tchaikovsky's
strange two-sidedness: on one
hand his intense emotionality in all
personal matters, his headstrong
impetuosity, leaping first and looking afterwards; on the
other his candor and modesty, his intelligent acceptance of
criticism, even his carefulness and good workmanship-he
had covered France with his hand"! If he had only been able
to reconcile that lifelong feud between his over-personal
heart and his magnanimous mind, he would have been saved
endless suffering. But he was not: in his music his
self-criticism, as on of his best biographers, Edwin Evans,
has remarked, "came after and not during composition"-he
destroyed score after score. And in daily life he never
learned to apply the advice of a wit tot he victim of a
temperament like his: "less remorse and more reform."

As a youth he reluctantly studied law, as much bore by it as
Schumann had been, and even became a petty clerk in the
Ministry of Justice. But in his early twenties he rebelled,
and against his family's wishes had the
courage to throw himself into the study of
music at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. He
was a ready improviser, playing well for
dancing and had a naturally rich sense of
harmony, but was so little schooled as to be
astonished when a cousin told him it was
possible to modulate form any key to
another. He went frequently to the Italian
operas which at that time almost
monopolized the Russian stage, and laid the
foundation of his lifelong love for Mozart;
but he had no acquaintance with Schumann,
and at 21 did not even know how many
symphonies Beethoven had composed. He
was an ardent worker nevertheless, and once
when Anton Rubinstein, his teacher of
composition, asked for variations, he sat up
all night and brought in two hundred. Is not that already the
very picture of a facility almost fatal?--a facility which in
even so fine a work as the Trio transforms an unoffending
Russian folk tune into a waltz, a mazurka, and even a fugue,
like a conjurer drawing rabbits out of the hat!

Early in 1866 he removed permanently to Moscow, with
which all his later musical fortunes are associated,
accepting a teaching post in the new conservatory just
established by Rubinstein's brother Nicholas. His early
attempts at composition, largely because of that same fatal
facility, had displeased himself as well as his friends; on
one of them, with that same
impersonal candour always flashing
out from him, he had scribbled the
words: "dreadful muck." Yet now he
had the courage to attempt his first
symphony, "Winter Dreams."
Musically it is not of great
importance, any more than are indeed
the second and third, one strongly
"folk and the other rather featureless,
in spite of a beautiful slow movement.
But the First Symphony is interesting
biographically for two reasons. Over
it, to begin with , its composer
worked his too-delicate nerves into a state of almost
pathological strain that was to recur at intervals all his life.
he suffers from insomnia, a sensation of hammering in the
head, and even hallucinations; and so painful was the whole
experience that he never again composed at night.

Of more importance is the vivid example his symphony give
us of the contrast between his passionately narrow attitude
in personal relations and his magnanimity and candour
whenever he could get away from that stifling atmosphere
into the free air of impersonal art. His eager wish for a
performance of the symphony in St. Petersburg, where his
works had so far been badly received, was peremptorily
refused by his old teacher, Anton Rubinstein. Here was the
kind of slight that any composer finds hard, but above all a
morbidly shy man like Peter Ilyich, which his easily hurt
pride. "This was the last straw," writes Evans-"he never
forgave Anton Rubinstein-he included din his dislike of the
Directors of the Music Society, the Press and even St.
Petersburg public. It was the last time he asked to have a
work performed there." And no doubt this "complex," as a
psychologist would be justified in calling it, was intensified
by the great success of the symphony, a year later, in
Moscow, when the young composer was called
unexpectedly to the stage-terribly nervous, carelessly
dressed, holding his hat in his hand, and making clumsy
bows.

So much for the personal side.
Now for the impersonal. Decades
later, hardly more than a year
before his death, he was asked for
his memories of Rubinstein. "In
him," he wrote in answer, "I adore
not only a great pianist and
composer but a man of rare
nobility, frank, loyal, generous,
incapable of petty and vulgar
sentiments . . . a man who towered
far above the common herd. . . . I
ok him an overture,The Storm, guilty of all kinds of
whims of form and orchestration. He was hurt, and said that
it was not for the development of imbeciles that he took the
trouble to teach composition. I left the Conservatory full of
gratitude for my professor."

Those who patronizingly regard Tchaikovsky as a neurotic
will do well to ask themselves how many artists there have
ever been who would be capable of such a disinterested
detachment. But he goes further.

"I have always regarded him," he continues, "as the greatest
of artists and the noblest of men, but I shall never become
his friend. . . . It would be difficult to explain the reason. I
think my amour propre as a composer has a great deal to do
with it. in my youth I was impatient to make my way. . . .
Painful as it is, I must confess that he did nothing, absolutely
nothing, to forward my plans. The most probably
explanation of this mortifying luke-warmness is that
Rubinstein does not care for my music, that my musical
temperament is antipathetic to him. [ Tchaikovsky's own
italics.]

"I still see him from time to time," ends the letter, "and
always with pleasure. At the time of his jubilee I had the
happiness of going through much trouble and fatigue for
him. . . . If I have told too little it is not my fault, nor that of
Anton, but of fatality."

Another letter equally lovable in its magnanimity is the long
one-to long to quote here-of Jan. 5 1878, to his
benefactress, Nadejda von Meck, about the Russian
Nationalists or Kutschka (literally "Bunch") of St.
Petersburg, placed by circumstances and to some extent by
tastes in opposition to himself and his Moscow fellows, but
always treated with consideration by him. The essence of
the opposition was that of Kutschka-Balakireff [sometimes
spelled as Balakirev], Rimsky-Korsakoff, Mussorgsky,
Borodin and Cesar Cui-were fanatical Nationalists,
believed that music began and ended with folk song, were
all, except Rimsky, rather amateurish in technique, and
tended to regard Tchaikovsky-the glibness of whose poor
moments indeed give them some excuse-as a "featureless
eclectic." Some of them, notably Cui, were scarcely civil in
the things they said of him. He, on the
other hand, describes in his letter their
merits as well as their defects with
surprising freedom from bias. For
example: "The young Petersburg
composers are very gifted, but
impregnated with the most horrible
presumptuousness and a purely
amateur conviction of their
superiority. Rimsky-Korsakoff
(Korsakov) is the only one among them who discovered. . .
that their doctrines had no sound basis, that their denial of
authority and of the masterpieces was nothing but ignorance.
. . . Cui is a gifted amateur. Borodin possesses a great
talent, which has come to nothing because fate has led him
in to the science laboratories instead of a vital music
existence. Moussorgsky's [Mussorgsky] gifts are perhaps
the most remarkable of all, but his nature is narrow and he
has no aspirations toward self-perfection. Besides, his
nature is not of the finest quality, and he likes what is
coarse, unpolished and ugly. . . ." "What a sad
phenomenon," he sums up. "so many talents from which,
whit the exception of Rimsky, we can scarcely dare to hope
for anything serious. But all the same, these forces exist.
Thus Moussorgsky [Mussorgsky], with all his ugliness,
speaks a new idiom. . . .We may reasonably hope that
Russia will one day produce a whole school of strong men
who will open new paths in art."

The first decade of Tchaikovsky's life in Moscow was one
of much struggle, intensified by several attacks of the
nervous depression and morbid self-disgust always dogging
him, of first meeting with some of his great contemporaries,
such as Turgenev, Tolstoi, Berlioz, Liszt, Saint-Saens, and
Wagner, of an abortive love-affair with opera singer
Desiree Artot, and above all of a varied production of many
kinds of music, of all types from operas to string quartets,
which laid the foundation of his skill and fame. Most of the
operas, written hastily, uncritically , and sometimes on
wretched librettos, were failures, the scores of which in a
number of cases he himself destroyed. At the other end of
the gamut of musical style are the three String Quartets
(1871, '74, and '76). All have interest but none quite
achieve the reticence and reserved beauty of true quartet
style. The Andante cantabile movement of the first, opus
11, founded on a folk-song the composer heard whistled by
a house painter, has become deservedly famous. The third,
in E-Flat Minor, contains music of a funereal solemnity and
tragic feeling anticipating the "Pathetic" Symphony. By far
the most successful of all these early works are the
orchestral ones where Tchaikovsky's passionate emotion
and flair for gorgeous colouring have full away: not perhaps
the symphonies (No.2, 1872, and No.3 1875) but more
dramatic conceptions like The Tempest (overture, 1873),
the tone-poem Francesca da Rimini (1876) and two
masterpieces, Romeo and Juliet composed in 1869, and
produced and revised a year later, and the magnificent
Piano Concerto in B Flat Minor, composed in 1874, at first
intended for Nicholas Rubinstein, but owing to his
indifference dedicated instead to Hans von Bulow. These
works, both by quantity and quality, amply justify the solid
and gradually spreading reputation of the middle seventies.

Then came a double crisis, involving two women, one of
whom, touching Tchaikovsky on his personal and most
vulnerable side, nearly wrecked him, and the other, lending
timely aid to the impersonal artist in him, the side of him
that was truly great, turned his life to new fruitfulness.
Antonina Ivanovana Milyukoff hurled
herself at his head, declaring in a
letter her love for him. He, though
misplaced chivalry, was quixotic
enough to marry her, July6, 1877.
Within a month he discovered their
utter incompatibility and on the 26th
wrote that a few more days of such
life would have driven him mad. He
left her for most of the Summer, but
made another attempt in early
September to live with her in Moscow. Before the month
was out he fled to St. Petersburg, arriving in complete
nervous collapse, and was taken to the hotel nearest the
station, where he became unconscious for 48 hours and then
passed into high fever. Ordered by the doctors to leave
Russia, he gradually regained strength at Clarens, a quiet
village on Lake Geneva, where he later did some of his best
work. Neither partner to this unfortunate marriage had any
blame to give the other.

Nadejda Fillaretovna von Meck [also spelled Nadezhda
von Meck], the widow of a wealthy railway engineer, had
fallen under the spell of Tchaikovsky's music the year
before, had given him several commissions, and had begun
the long correspondence with him that reveals for us so
much of his inner life. Nine years older than he and living in
a socially different world, rich and
apparently some what spoiled and
autocratic but at any rate sincere in
her love for his music, she had the
good sense or the good luck (it was
hard to tell which) to stipulate
from the first that they should have
no personal intercourse. They
could not be sure to avoid one or
two casual meetings at musical
events, but it is said they never
spoke to each other-they who
wrote so inexhaustibly. Nothing
could have been better suited to the
queer psychology of Tchaikovsky. Secure from upsetting
attacks of his personal privacy, he was provided form 1877
on, not only with an income of 6,000 rouble, which enabled
him to give up teaching but with a tireless listener to all his
opinions, beliefs, impressions, hopes, despairs, and
aspirations.

Almost at once he resumed work on the splendid Fourth
Symphony which he had begun before the unfortunate
marriage; and early in 1878 finished it, and also his most
successful opera, Eugene Onegin. That same year he wrote
at Clarens the immensely popular Violin Concerto.
Manfred followed in 1885; the Fifth Symphony in 1888;
another successful opera, Pique Dame (The Queen of
Spades), in 1890; the Casse-Noisette Ballet, from which
the delightful Suite is drawn, in 1891. In these prosperous
years his fame all over the world was rapidly increasing; he
visited most of the European capitals for performances of
his works; and there even began to be Tchaikovsky
Festivals. Under the genial influence of all this sunshine he
partially forgot, or put aside, his
shyness, and took up the baton again,
at first with many qualms, but
gradually with so much assurance that
in 1888 he made an international
conducting tour, appearing in Leipzig,
Hamburg, Prague, Paris, and London.
Three years later he even ventured to
come across the Atlantic and conduct
his own works in New York at the
ceremonies of the opening Carnegie
Hall, as may be read in his letters in
amusing details of his triumph and
homesickness. And for the summers
there were a series of modest but
comfortable country houses in Russia where he could
compose in peace, from Maidanova, with which he began to
Klin, near Moscow. Only at the end of 1890, three years
before his death, came the inevitable rupture with Madame
von Meck, and by that time he was financially independent,
so the break affected his spirits more than his music. In
1893 he wrote at Klin his most famous work, the "Pathetic"
Symphony, and conducted it at St. Petersburg on Oct. 28. It
was coolly received, and he did not live to witness its
success. Only a few days later he drank a glass of unfiltered
water, and died of cholera, Nov. 6, 1893.