Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was a Russian composer of the Romantic era and the first from his country whose music won a lasting place abroad. Trained in the Western tradition at Russia's first conservatory, he combined European forms with Russian melody in symphonies, concertos, operas and the ballets Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker. His success came alongside recurring personal crises, and his sudden death at 53 is still debated.

Tchaikovsky was born on 7 May 1840 at Votkinsk, a small ironworks town in Vyatka Governorate in the Russian Empire, where his father managed the works as a mining engineer. He began piano lessons at five. Since Russia then had almost no professional musical training and musicians had low status, his parents prepared him for government service. In 1850, aged ten, he was sent to Saint Petersburg, far from his family, to attend the Imperial School of Jurisprudence. His mother died of cholera in 1854, a loss that marked him for life. He graduated in 1859 and joined the Ministry of Justice.

In 1859 the pianist Anton Rubinstein and Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna founded the Russian Musical Society, with the backing of Alexander II, to develop native talent. Tchaikovsky attended its classes and in 1862 joined the first intake of the new Saint Petersburg Conservatory, graduating in 1865. Anton's brother Nikolai then appointed him professor of music theory at the new Moscow Conservatory. From 1867 to 1878 he taught there, wrote music criticism and composed.

His Western training set him apart from the Five, the nationalist group of Balakirev, Mussorgsky, Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin and Cui, who distrusted conservatories. Balakirev helped shape his first recognised masterpiece, the fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet of 1869, and the group welcomed his Second Symphony. Works of the following years included the First Piano Concerto, the Rococo Variations, the Third and Fourth Symphonies and Swan Lake.

Biographers generally agree that Tchaikovsky was homosexual, a side of his life later suppressed by Soviet censors. In 1877 he married a former student, Antonina Miliukova. The marriage collapsed within about two and a half months, and he left Russia for a year, during which he finished the opera Eugene Onegin and the Violin Concerto. At the same time he began a 13-year relationship, conducted entirely by letter, with Nadezhda von Meck, a wealthy railway magnate's widow. Her regular support let him leave teaching and travel widely, making him in effect Russia's first full-time professional composer.

In 1880 he wrote the 1812 Overture for celebrations in Moscow, privately dismissing it as loud and lacking warmth; it became one of his best-known pieces.

In the mid-1880s Tchaikovsky's standing in Russia rose sharply. Alexander III gave him an order carrying hereditary nobility in 1884 and a lifetime pension the next year, making him a court composer in all but title. He overcame stage fright to conduct his own music across Europe and in 1891 travelled to the United States, conducting at the opening concert of Carnegie Hall in New York. He was elected to the French Académie des Beaux-Arts in 1892, and Cambridge gave him an honorary doctorate in 1893.

Tchaikovsky died in Saint Petersburg on 6 November 1893, aged 53. The usual explanation is cholera from drinking unboiled water, but in the 1980s some scholars suggested suicide, and the evidence remains inconclusive. He was buried at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery near Glinka, Borodin and Mussorgsky.

Critics in Russia sometimes found him too Western, and some in the West too Russian, but audiences everywhere embraced his melodies. By joining European craftsmanship to Russian character, he showed later Russian composers that their music could belong to the wider world, and he was among the first to present Russian music to foreign audiences in person.

Our 1878 and 1880 maps show the Russian Empire in the years of Swan Lake, Eugene Onegin and his wanderings abroad, and the 1900 map shows it a few years after his death.