Pyotr ilyich tchaikovsky brief biography of joe

Royal Ballet. See more Best classical music. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Biography. Tchaikovsky video. Tchaikovsky features. Preview Track Preview. Once he had to take six months off school because of a sickness. His illnesses, anxiety, and sensitivity were problems which would sadly affect him on and off for the rest of his life. His father, noticing his son's enthusiasm for music, got him good teachersand an orchestrion a kind of music box that imitates elaborate orchestral sounds.

Tchaikovsky fell in love with Mozart click for biography 's music by listening to the orchestrion. The fascinating music box was probably Tchaikovky's first musical mentor! His father didn't want his son having a career as a musician, however, since it wasn't quite proper. So he sent Peter Ilich to train as a civil servant in the School of Jurisprudence.

On his first day of school, his mother dropped the terrified young Tchaikovsky off. He screamed and ran after her carriage as it drove away, but he couldn't catch it. He didn't see her again for two years. The event deeply marked the young boy, and altered his character towards the melancholy man he was in later life. His mother died of cholera in Tchaikovsky was wretched and devastated.

He was moved to write down one of his pieces for the first time before, he just improvised as a touching eulogy for his dead mother. He graduated school, and entered the Ministry of Justice in But he resigned from the drudgery four years later, to start a musical career. It was just as well: he found the work tedious and dull. Later, when someone asked him what he had actually done there, Tchaikovsky said he couldn't even remember!

Pyotr Ilyich started studying at the St Petersburg conservatorywhere he had two main teachers: Nikolai Zarembaand Anton Rubinstein. Rubinstein was quite conservative, and got really angry at one of Tchaikovsky's homework exercises the symphonic poem The Storm. Inhe completed the ballet Swan Lake as well as the fantasy Francesca da Rimini. While the former has come to be one of the most frequently performed ballets of all time, Tchaikovsky again endured the ire of critics, who at its premiere panned it as too complex and too "noisy.

Tchaikovsky resigned from the Moscow Conservatory in to focus his efforts entirely on composing. As a result, he spent the remainder of his career composing more prolifically than ever. His collective body of work constitutes pieces, including symphonies, operas, ballets, concertos, cantatas and songs.

Pyotr ilyich tchaikovsky brief biography of joe

Struggling with societal pressures to repress his homosexuality, inTchaikovsky married a young music student named Antonina Milyukova. The marriage was a catastrophe, with Tchaikovsky abandoning his wife within weeks of the wedding. During a nervous breakdown, he unsuccessfully attempted to commit suicide, and eventually fled abroad.

Tchaikovsky could afford to resign from the Moscow Conservatory inthanks to the patronage of a wealthy widow named Nadezhda von Meck. She provided him with a monthly allowance until ; oddly, their arrangement stipulated that they would never meet. Tchaikovsky died in St. While the cause of his death was officially declared as cholera, some of his biographers believe that he committed suicide after the humiliation of a sex scandal trial.

However, only oral no written documentation exists to support this theory. We strive for accuracy and fairness. If you see something that doesn't look right, contact us! We do not know how Tchaikovsky died. Of Tchaikovsky's Western predecessors, Robert Schumann stands out as an influence in formal structure, harmonic practices, and piano writing, according to Brown and musicologist Roland John Wiley.

Tchaikovsky displayed a wide stylistic and emotional range, from light salon works to grand symphonies. Some of his works, such as the Variations on a Rococo Themeemploy a "Classical" form reminiscent of 18th-century composers such as Mozart his favorite composer. Other compositions, such as his Little Russian symphony and his opera Vakula the Smithflirt with musical practices more akin to those of the 'Five', especially in their use of folk song.

American music critic and journalist Harold C. Schonberg wrote of Tchaikovsky's "sweet, inexhaustible, supersensuous fund of melody ", a feature that has ensured his music's continued success with audiences. Sometimes he used Western-style melodies, sometimes original melodies written in the style of Russian folk song; sometimes he used actual folk songs.

The first challenge arose from his ethnic heritage. Unlike Western themes, the melodies that Russian composers wrote tended to be self-contained: they functioned with a mindset of stasis and repetition rather than one of progress and ongoing development. On a technical level, it made modulating to a new key to introduce a contrasting second theme exceedingly difficult, as this was literally a foreign concept that did not exist in Russian music.

The second way melody worked against Tchaikovsky was a challenge that he shared with the majority of Romantic-age composers. They did not write in the regular, symmetrical melodic shapes that worked well with sonata formsuch as those favored by Classical composers such as Haydn, Mozart or Beethoven; rather, the themes favored by Romantics were complete and independent in themselves.

This challenge was why the Romantics "were never natural symphonists". Harmony could be a potential trap for Tchaikovsky, according to Brown, since Russian creativity tended to focus on inertia and self-enclosed tableaux, while Western harmony worked against this to propel the music onward and, on a larger scale, shape it. Modulation maintained harmonic interest over an extended time scale, provided a clear contrast between musical themes, and showed how those themes were related to each other.

RhythmicallyTchaikovsky sometimes experimented with unusual meters. More often, he used a firm, regular meter, a practice that served him well in dance music. At times, his rhythms became pronounced enough to become the main expressive agent of the music. They also became a means, found typically in Russian folk music, of simulating movement or progression in large-scale symphonic movements—a "synthetic propulsion", as Brown phrases it, which substituted for the momentum that would be created in strict sonata form by the interaction of melodic or motivic elements.

This interaction generally does not take place in Russian music. Tchaikovsky struggled with sonata form. Its principle of organic growth through the interplay of musical themes was alien to Russian practice. According to Brown and musicologists Hans Keller and Daniel ZhitomirskyTchaikovsky found his solution to large-scale structure while composing the Fourth Symphony.

He essentially sidestepped thematic interaction and kept sonata form only as an "outline", as Zhitomirsky phrases it. Tchaikovsky placed blocks of dissimilar tonal and thematic material alongside one another, with what Keller calls "new and violent contrasts" between musical themeskeysand harmonies. Partly owing to the melodic and structural intricacies involved in this accumulation and partly due to the composer's nature, Tchaikovsky's music became intensely expressive.

This music has the mark of the truly lived and felt experience". This active engagement with the music "opened for the listener a vista of emotional and psychological tension and an extremity of feeling that possessed relevance because it seemed reminiscent of one's own 'truly lived and felt experience' or one's search for intensity in a deeply personal sense".

As mentioned above, repetition was a natural part of Tchaikovsky's music, just as it is an integral part of Russian music. By making subtle but noticeable changes in the rhythm or phrasing of a tune, modulating to another key, changing the melody itself or varying the instruments playing it, Tchaikovsky could keep a listener's interest from flagging.

By extending the number of repetitions, he could increase the musical and dramatic tension of a passage, building "into an emotional experience of almost unbearable intensity", as Brown phrases it, controlling when the peak and release of that tension would take place. Like other late Romantic composers, Tchaikovsky relied heavily on orchestration for musical effects.

Rimsky-Korsakov regularly referred his students at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory to it and called it "devoid of all striving after effect, [to] give a healthy, beautiful sonority". Tchaikovsky's expert use of having two or more instruments play a melody simultaneously a practice called doubling and his ear for uncanny combinations of instruments resulted in "a generalized orchestral sonority in which the individual timbres of the instruments, being thoroughly mixed, would vanish".

In works like the "Serenade for Strings" and the Variations on a Rococo ThemeTchaikovsky showed he was pyotr ilyich tchaikovsky brief biography of joe gifted at writing in a style of 18th-century European pastiche. Tchaikovsky graduated from imitation to full-scale evocation in the ballet The Sleeping Beauty and the opera The Queen of Spades.

His Rococo pastiches also may have offered escape into a musical world purer than his own, into which he felt himself irresistibly drawn. In this sense, Tchaikovsky operated in the opposite manner to Igor Stravinskywho turned to Neoclassicism partly as a form of compositional self-discovery. Tchaikovsky's attraction to ballet might have allowed a similar refuge into a fairy-tale world, where he could freely write dance music within a tradition of French elegance.

Maes maintains that, regardless of what he was writing, Tchaikovsky's main concern was how his music affected his listeners on an aesthetic level, at specific moments in the piece, and on a cumulative level once the music had finished. What his listeners experienced on an emotional or visceral level became an end in itself. Considering that he lived and worked in what was probably the last 19th-century feudal nation, the statement is not actually that surprising.

And yet, even when writing so-called 'programme' music, for example, his Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture, he cast it in sonata form. His use of stylized 18th-century melodies and patriotic themes was geared toward the values of Russian aristocracy. Using it in the finale of a work could assure its success with Russian listeners. Tchaikovsky's relationship with collaborators was mixed.

Like Nikolai Rubinstein with the First Piano Concerto, virtuoso and pedagogue Leopold Auer rejected the Violin Concerto initially but changed his mind; he played it to great public success and taught it to his students, who included Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein. Tchaikovsky was angered by Fitzenhagen's license but did nothing; the Rococo Variations were published with the cellist's amendments.

His collaboration on the three ballets went better and in Marius Petipawho worked with him on the last two, he might have found an advocate. Tchaikovsky compromised to make his music as practical as possible for the dancers and was accorded more creative freedom than ballet composers were usually accorded at the time. He responded with scores that minimized the rhythmic subtleties normally present in his work but were inventive and rich in melody, with more refined and imaginative orchestration than in the average ballet score.

Critical reception to Tchaikovsky's music was varied but also improved over time. Even aftersome inside Russia held it suspect for not being nationalistic enough and thought Western European critics lauded it for exactly that reason. Pandemonium, delirium tremensraving, and above all, noise pyotr ilyich tchaikovsky brief biography of joe confounded!

The division between Russian and Western critics remained through much of the 20th century but for a different reason. According to Brown and Wiley, the prevailing view of Western critics was that the same qualities in Tchaikovsky's music that appealed to audiences—its strong emotions, directness and eloquence and colorful orchestration—added up to compositional shallowness.

Conservative critics, he adds, may have felt threatened by the "violence and 'hysteria ' " they detected and felt such emotive displays "attacked the boundaries of conventional aesthetic appreciation—the cultured reception of art as an act of formalist discernment—and the polite engagement of art as an act of amusement". There has also been the fact that the composer did not follow sonata form strictly, relying instead on juxtaposing blocks of tonalities and thematic groups.

Maes states this point has been seen at times as a weakness rather than a sign of originality. In a article, New York Times critic Allan Kozinn writes, "It is Tchaikovsky's flexibility, after all, that has given us a sense of his variability Tchaikovsky was capable of turning out music—entertaining and widely beloved though it is—that seems superficial, manipulative and trivial when regarded in the context of the whole literature.

The First Piano Concerto is a case in point. It makes a joyful noise, it swims in pretty tunes and its dramatic rhetoric allows or even requires a soloist to make a grand, swashbuckling impression. But it is entirely hollow". In the 21st century, however, critics are reacting more positively to Tchaikovsky's tunefulness, originality, and craftsmanship.

Horowitz maintains that, while the standing of Tchaikovsky's music has fluctuated among critics, for the public, "it never went out of style, and his most popular works have yielded iconic sound-bytes [ sic ], such as the love theme from Romeo and Juliet ". According to Wiley, Tchaikovsky was a pioneer in several ways. This, Wiley adds, allowed him the time and freedom to consolidate the Western compositional practices he had learned at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory with Russian folk song and other native musical elements to fulfill his own expressive goals and forge an original, deeply personal style.

He made an impact in not only complete works such as the symphony but also program music and, as Wiley phrases it, "transformed Liszt's and Berlioz's achievements They point out that only Glinka had preceded him in combining Russian and Western practices and his teachers in Saint Petersburg had been thoroughly Germanic in their musical outlook.

He was, they write, for all intents and purposes alone in his artistic quest. Maes and Taruskin write that Tchaikovsky believed that his professionalism in combining skill and high standards in his musical works separated him from his contemporaries in The Five. Like his country, Maes writes, it took him time to discover how to express his Russianness in a way that was true to himself and what he had learned.

Because of his professionalism, Maes says, he worked hard at this goal and succeeded. The composer's friend, music critic Herman Larochewrote of The Sleeping Beauty that the score contained "an element deeper and more general than color, in the internal structure of the music, above all in the foundation of the element of melody. This basic element is undoubtedly Russian".

Tchaikovsky was inspired to reach beyond Russia with his music, according to Maes and Taruskin. Between these two very different worlds, Tchaikovsky's music became the sole bridge". According to musicologist Leonid SabaneyevTchaikovsky was not comfortable with being recorded for posterity and tried to shy away from it. On an apparently separate visit from the one related above, Block asked the composer to play something on a piano or at least say something.

Tchaikovsky refused. He told Block, "I am a bad pianist and my voice is raspy. Why should one eternalize it? Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools.