Pyotr (Peter) Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in 1840 (just a hundred years before the debut of Khachaturian’s violin concerto) in Votkinsk, near St. Petersburg, the third of seven children.  Extremely sensitive – “a porcelain child,” his governess called him – he was loved by his siblings.  At ten he was enrolled in a St. Petersburg school of jurisprudence. When he graduated ten years later he took a job as law clerk, but soon despaired of the emptiness of his life.  The study of music, which had long been a diversion for him, now took on greater importance.

He signed up for a course in harmony at the Russian Musical Society, and when, two years later, it became the St. Petersburg Conservatory under Anton Rubinstein, he entered Rubinstein’s composition class there, quitting his job to become a full-time student, and supporting himself as a free-lance musician.  He graduated in1865, the year Rubinstein’s brother Nikolai opened the Moscow Conservatory.  Nikolai offered Tchaikovsky a position there teaching harmony.  Tchaikovsky took it.

Generally considered Russia’s greatest, and certainly its most popular, composer, Tchaikovsky has also been described as Russia’s first full-fledged “professional” composer.  He alone among his contemporaries Rimsky-Korsakov, Borodin, and Mussorgsky, was the product of a conservatory.

During his conservatory years he was a prolific composer, and by the time he was forty, the popularity of his compositions was firmly established.  He had seen five of his operas, the ballet Swan Lake, and countless smaller works produced.  Celebrated at home, he was becoming increasingly recognized and respected abroad.  In 1873 his orchestral fantasy The Tempest had so captivated a fabulously wealthy widow named Nadejda von Meck that she assumed the roles of both muse and Maecenas, and for fourteen years supported him through crises financial and emotional.  And there were plenty of both.

Emotionally he was a disaster, his excruciating shyness exacerbated by terror that his homosexuality would be discovered. In 1876 he determined to get married, “no matter with whom,” and did so the following year to a pretty, hero-worshiping, intensely heterosexual conservatory student.  Within weeks, the disastrous marriage was over.  He attempted suicide in a river.

But by that time his correspondence with Madam von Meck – they never met in person – had begun, and her emotional and financial support helped sustain him through the crisis.  He quit his post at the conservatory, but, true professional that he was, he continued to compose.  “An artist lives a double life; an everyday human life and an artistic life, and the two do not always go hand in hand,” he wrote Madam von Meck.  And: “It is absolutely necessary for a composer to shake off all the cares of daily existence and give himself up entirely to his art-life.”  He continued to work on his Fourth Symphony and the opera, Eugene Onegin.

A decade passed before he began his next symphony, and he began it with no confidence. He was beginning to “squeeze out, with difficulty, a symphony from my bedulled brain,” he declared in the summer of 1888.  And later: “It contains something repellent, an excess of color and insincerity, something labored…”. But he kept working. “It is only necessary to obey our inward promptings,” he once observed.  And, “There is no hour of the day in which I cannot compose.”

The first movement opens with a gentle melody from the clarinets, soon followed by a lively Allegro.  The second is dominated by a haunting french horn solo, possibly the best known melody in the classical repertoire.  The third is a waltz, again a familiar tune, although a rather somber one.  The fourth, after a sedate beginning, becomes brisk, boisterous, and triumphant.  When Brahms heard this movement, he did not like it.  This disturbed Tchaikovsky, but then, Tchaikovsky didn’t like Brahms’ music, either.  Brahms “makes great pretensions to profundity,” he had written in 1880, and, “These depths contain nothing; they are void. … I cannot abide him.”

Despite these and other misgivings, Tchaikovsky took his Fifth Symphony on a conducting tour through Europe the following year.  It gained ever increasing acceptance and popularity, a popularity that has only increased since then, ranking it today with those of Beethoven.

He died in 1893, aged fifty-three, apparently of cholera, a day after drinking a quantity of water that had not been boiled.