Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, Russia, the son of a mining engineer. He showed musical talent early but was sent to a school of jurisprudence and worked as a government clerk. In 1862 he enrolled at the new St. Petersburg Conservatory, and in 1866 he became a teacher of harmony at the Moscow Conservatory. His music joined Russian melodies and feeling with the forms of Western European music. A wealthy widow, Nadezhda von Meck, supported him with a yearly allowance for thirteen years, allowing him to compose full time, though by agreement they never met. He wrote six symphonies, concertos for piano and violin, the operas Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, and the 1812 Overture, which celebrates Russia's defeat of Napoleon with cannon fire. His three ballets, Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, are among the most performed ballets in the world. In 1891 he conducted at the opening of Carnegie Hall in New York. He conducted the premiere of his Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique, in October 1893 and died nine days later in St. Petersburg, officially of cholera.

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