PETER ILYICH TCHAIKOVSKY

INTERESTING FACTS

• On the 10th of June 1859, the 19-year-old Tchaikovsky graduated as a titular counselor, a low rung on civil service ladder
• His top 2 most famous works are the Sleeping Beauty and the Nutcracker
• He was a composer and pianist
• He also, played the orchestra piano

PARENTS

• His parents were Alexandra and Ilya Tchaikovsky
• Ilya was a mining engineer and manager of the Kamasko-Votkinks iron works
• Alexandra was a Russian and French ancestry

SIBLINGS

• His siblings were Modest, Zinaida, Nikolai, Aleksandra, Anatoly, and Ippolit Tchaikovsky
• Alexandra was from his father’s second marriage and his half-sister Zenaida was from his father’s first marriage

PETER(EARLY YEARS)

• He was close his sister Alexandra and his twin brothers Anatoly and Modest
• Once 2 years past Tchaikovsky transferred to the Imperial School of Jurisprudence to begin a seven-year course of studies
• Tchaikovsky’s early separation from his mother caused an emotional trauma that lasted the rest of his life and was intensified by her death from cholera in 1854 when he was 14
• In 1855, Tchaikovsky father funded private lessons with Rudolph Kundinger

MIDDLE YEARS

• He moved to Moscow to teach music theory at the Russian Musical Society
• His first symphony was in G Minor
• His first opera was the Voyevoda
• In 1868 Tchaikovsky met a Belgian mezzo-soprano named Desiree Artot, with whom he fleetingly contemplated a marriage

FINAL YEARS

• Tchaikovsky settled down in a rented country house near Kin, outside of Moscow
• Between October 1888 and 1889 he composed his second ballet, the Sleeping Beauty
• He completed his last two competitions for the stage, one of them was the Nutcracker

LEGACY

• During Tchaikovskys lifetime, Russian musicians attacked his style as insufficiently nationalistic
• Tchaikovsky anticipated certain sensibilities that later became prominent in the culture of Russian modernism
• Tchaikovsky was inspired by Russian folk music

YEARS OF FAME

• Tchaikovsky left Russia to travel
• He was powerfully impressed by a performance of Georges Bizet’s Carmen
• Early in 1878 he finished several of his most famous compositions
• Over the next 10 years Tchaikovsky produced his operas Mazepa

MORE INTERESTING FACTS

• Young Tchaikovsky got an excellent general education at the School of Jurisprudence and refined his piano skills under the guidance of the director of the music library
• When his mother died of cholera in 1854, Tchaikovsky composed a waltz in her memory
• Nikolai Zaremba urged Tchaikovsky to resign his job and continue in the studies of music
• After graduation, Anton Rubinstein’s younger brother Nikolai Grigoryevich went up to Tchaikovsky with an offer of the post of the professor of harmony, composition, and the history of music, which he gladly accepted, in part because his father had retired and gambled away his property.

SWAN LAKE

NUTCRACKER

ROMEO AND JULIET

THE WEBSITES I USED

• Brittancia
• New World en Cyclopidia
• Wikipedia