Chukovsky Peter Ilyich biography. Great Russian Composers: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on April 25 (May 7), 1840 in the city of Votkinsk in a large family of an engineer. Music was often played in Tchaikovsky's house. His parents were fond of playing the piano and organ.

In Tchaikovsky's biography, it is important to note that already at the age of five he already knew how to play the piano, and three years later he played the notes perfectly. In 1849 the Tchaikovsky family moved to Alapaevsk and then to St. Petersburg.

Education

Tchaikovsky received his early education at home. Then Peter studied at a boarding school for two years, after which he studied at the St. Petersburg School of Law. Tchaikovsky's creativity during this period was manifested in extracurricular music lessons. The death of the mother in 1862 greatly affected the vulnerable child. After graduating from college in 1859, Peter began to serve in the Department of Justice.

AT free time often visited the opera house, he was especially impressed by the productions of operas by Mozart and Glinka.

Having shown a penchant for composing music, Tchaikovsky became a student at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. Further studies in the life of Pyotr Ilyich with excellent teachers N. Zaremba, A. Rubinshtein largely helped the formation of a musical personality. After graduating from the conservatory, the composer Tchaikovsky was invited by Nikolai Rubinstein (the teacher's brother) to the Moscow Conservatory as a professor.

Creative and personal life

Many of Tchaikovsky's concertos were written while working at the conservatory. The opera Ondine (1869) was not staged, the author destroyed it. Only a small part of it was later presented as Tchaikovsky's ballet " Swan Lake».

It is worth noting briefly that in 1877, in order to get rid of gossip about his unconventional orientation, Tchaikovsky decided to marry a student at the conservatory, Antonina Milyukova. Feeling no feelings for his wife, a few weeks later, he left her forever. Since then, the couple have lived separately, they have not been able to divorce due to various circumstances.

In 1878 he left the conservatory and went abroad. At the same time, Tchaikovsky was in close contact with Nadezhda von Meck, a wealthy admirer of his music. She is in correspondence with him, supports him financially and morally.

During the two years of his residence in Italy, Switzerland, new magnificent works of Tchaikovsky appear - the opera "Eugene Onegin", the Fourth Symphony.

In May 1878, Tchaikovsky made a contribution to the children's musical literature- writes a collection of plays for children called "Children's Album".

After financial assistance from Nadezhda von Meck, the composer travels a lot. From 1881 to 1888 he wrote many works. In particular, waltzes, symphonies, overtures, suites.

Finally, in the biography of Pyotr Tchaikovsky, a calm creative period, at the same time the author himself was able to conduct at concerts.

Death and legacy

Tchaikovsky died in St. Petersburg on October 25 (November 6), 1893 from cholera. He was buried in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra in St. Petersburg.

Streets, conservatories in Moscow and Kyiv, as well as other musical institutions (institutes, colleges, schools) in many cities of the former USSR are named after the great composer. Monuments have been erected in his honor, a theater and a concert hall, a symphony orchestra and an international music competition are named after him.

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Young Tchaikovsky

Great Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in the distant times of the heyday of romanticism: April 25, 1840, in Votkinsk, in the Vyatka province of the Russian Empire. Now he is best known as a composer, but among his roles one should also highlight the conductor, music journalist and teacher.

The greatest composer in the history of music composed not so much, only eighty works, including three operas and seven symphonies (six numbered and one named), the famous ballets Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, Sleeping Beauty, which themselves themselves are an extremely valuable contribution to world culture.

But back to the beginning of our story.

Ilya Tchaikovsky, the father of Pyotr Ilyich, became known as an outstanding Russian engineer, but Pyotr Fedorovich, the grandfather of the future composer, was not always Tchaikovsky. Initially, he had the surname Chaika, and he was born in the village of Nikolaevka, in the Poltava region. He received a medical education and then served as a medical officer.

Peter's parents were very fond of music. His mother played the piano and the homemade mechanical organ, the orchestra. They often heard the melodic songs of factory workers and peasants. Subsequently, the governess Fanny Dyurbach wrote the following lines to Peter: “I especially loved the quiet, soft evenings at the end of summer ... from the balcony we listened to gentle and sad songs, only they broke the silence of these wonderful nights. You must remember them, none of you went to bed then. If you remember these melodies, put them to music. You will enchant those who cannot hear them in your country.”

Peter grew up as a smart, intelligent boy. At the age of six, he spoke freely and wrote not only in his native Russian, but also in German and French. However, the gifted child was also very painful. At school, he missed classes for six months in a row due to ill health.

When the future composer was about nine years old, his family moved to Alapaevsk. He later described this event in his book "12 Journeys in the Middle Urals".

Peter's parents felt uncomfortable because of their modest origin, and therefore sent their son to the Imperial School of Law. It was located near the street, which now bears the name of Tchaikovsky.

Peter spent two years very far from his home and from people close to him. Most of all, the young man was worried about separation from his mother, to whom he was strongly attached. It is interesting that even then he was very ironic about the newly appeared family coat of arms and in every possible way emphasized his plebeian origin. Perhaps this was the result of early democratic views.

1852 year. The family is reunited in St. Petersburg, and Pyotr Ilyich enters the school. He soon gains a reputation as a reasonably good improvisational pianist. And at the age of sixteen he began to study with Luigi Piccioli and most devote time to music. Then Rudolf Kündinger becomes the mentor of the young man.

Having completed his studies at the school, and this happened in 1859, Tchaikovsky received the rank of titular adviser, after which he began to work in the Ministry of Justice.

In 1862, he became one of the first students of the St. Petersburg Conservatory in the composition class. He was taught theory by Nikolai Ivanovich Zaremba, who did not publish any of his works during his lifetime. However, he was the first in Russia to teach music theory in Russian. This teacher expounded extremely lively and figuratively, and often clothed his musical-theoretical statements in a religious shell. Then he also ridiculed this peculiarity of his in his work "Raika".

But young Tchaikovsky was taught orchestration by Anton Grigoryevich Rubinshein, now known both as a teacher and as a pianist. Tchaikovsky became his most famous student, but he himself is considered a great man with an inexhaustible supply of energy that allowed him to engage in such diverse activities.

Here Anton Grigorievich Rubinshein at one time insisted that Pyotr Ilyich quit his service and began to study music entirely.

This idyll continued until 1865, when Peter graduated from the St. Petersburg Conservatory with a large silver medal. At that time, he wrote a cantata to Schiller's ode "To Joy". Among other works by Tchaikovsky, written in his student years, one can single out the overture to Ostrovsky's Thunderstorm and the dances of hay girls, which he later included in the opera Voyevoda.

Growing reputation and worldwide fame

Tchaikovsky while teaching at the Moscow Conservatory

In January 1866, Nikolai Grigorievich Rubinshtein, director of the newly founded Moscow Conservatory and brother of the teacher Tchaikovsky, invited him to Moscow, where Peter received a professorship in free composition, harmony, theory, and orchestration classes.

In 1868, Pyotr Ilyich first appeared as a music critic. Then he met the members of "". Although they differed in their views on music, they retained friendly relations.

At this time, Tchaikovsky awakens interest in program music. Program music is a genre in which the idea of ​​a musical work is conveyed in an accompanying treatise. invites Peter to write a fantasy overture, and he begins to work on "Romeo and Juliet", which later brought him worldwide fame, and with which the composer's fame began to grow like a snowball. In addition, Stasov suggested to him the idea of ​​​​the symphonic fantasy "The Tempest".

Around the same time, he met the opera singer Desiro Artaud. They were in love with each other, and even planned to get married, but for some reason she married a Spanish singer.

Tchaikovsky and his wife Antonina Milyukova, 1877

The seventies of the nineteenth century in the work of Pyotr Tchaikovsky became a time of search. He became interested in the past of Russia, its history, culture, way of life and the fate of the Russian people. Then he wrote the opera Oprichnik, Vakula the Blacksmith, The Snow Maiden, the Swan Lake ballet and many other equally interesting works.

By 1877, various obscene rumors began to circulate about his personal life, and in order to put an end to gossip, he decides to marry Antonina Milyukova, a former student at the conservatory. She was eight years younger than him, but the rumors about his homosexuality, as it turned out, did not arise from scratch, and after just a few weeks their marriage broke up. The marriage broke up, but they failed to get a divorce, and they still lived in a separate marriage.

Having received a certain freedom, he left the Moscow Conservatory the following year and went abroad. This trip was sponsored by Nadezhda von Meck, the widow of a railway magnate, with whom Peter never personally met (more precisely, he met once, but both were silent from embarrassment), but kept an active correspondence. Their strange relationship came to an end in 1891 when von Meck suddenly stopped sending both letters and money. He dedicated his Fourth Symphony to her.

In 1881, he realized that it was time to do something about the debts. And he wrote a letter to the emperor, in which he asked to lend him three thousand rubles so that the debt would be deducted from subsequent productions of Tchaikovsky. He explained why he needed such a large amount, and the sovereign not only lent him, but presented it as an allowance.

Perhaps this was one of the reasons that in the mid-eighties Tchaikovsky began to work actively again, he was elected director of the Moscow branch of the RMS, and his work became widely known abroad. In 1885, he stopped active travels in Europe and Russia and settled in a landowner's house near Klin. Since that time, he began an active promotion of Russian music.

It should be noted that all his life Tchaikovsky loved everything Russian, was proud that he was born in Russia and did not tolerate hints of his Polish roots.

Once, while still a boy, Peter was looking at a map of Europe, and suddenly began to kiss the territory of Russia and, as it were, spit on all the other countries!

At the end of his life, Tchaikovsky worked increasingly as a conductor.

last years of life

At the end of his life, he worked more and more not as a composer, but as a conductor. In 1889 he made a tour of Germany and Switzerland, where he met Johannes Brahms and

From century to century, from generation to generation, our love for Tchaikovsky, for his beautiful music, passes on, and this is its immortality.
D. Shostakovich

“I would like with all the strength of my soul that my music spread, that the number of people who love it, find comfort and support in it, will increase.” In these words of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, the task of his art, which he saw in the service of music and people, in “truthfully, sincerely and simply” talking with them about the most important, serious and exciting things, is precisely defined. The solution of such a problem was possible with the development of the richest experience of Russian and world musical culture, while mastering the highest professional composing skills. The constant tension of creative forces, everyday and inspired work on the creation of numerous musical works made up the content and meaning of the whole life of the great artist.

Tchaikovsky was born into the family of a mining engineer. From early childhood, he showed an acute susceptibility to music, quite regularly studied the piano, which he was good at by the time he graduated from the School of Law in St. Petersburg (1859). Already serving in the department of the Ministry of Justice (until 1863), in 1861 he entered the classes of the RMS, transformed into the St. Petersburg Conservatory (1862), where he studied composition with N. Zaremba and A. Rubinshtein. After graduating from the conservatory (1865), Tchaikovsky was invited by N. Rubinstein to teach at the Moscow Conservatory, which opened in 1866. The activities of Tchaikovsky (he taught classes of compulsory and special theoretical disciplines) laid the foundations of the pedagogical tradition of the Moscow Conservatory, this was facilitated by the creation of a textbook of harmony, translations of various teaching aids and others. In 1868, Tchaikovsky first appeared in print with articles in support of N. Rimsky-Korsakov and M. Balakirev (friendly creative relations arose with him), and in 1871-76. was a musical chronicler for the newspapers Sovremennaya Letopis and Russkiye Vedomosti.

The articles, as well as extensive correspondence, reflected the aesthetic ideals of the composer, who had especially deep sympathy for the art of W. A. ​​Mozart, M. Glinka, R. Schumann. Rapprochement with the Moscow Artistic Circle, which was headed by A. N. Ostrovsky (the first opera by Tchaikovsky "Voevoda" - 1868 was written based on his play; even during the years of study - the overture "Thunderstorm", in 1873 - music for the play " Snow Maiden"), trips to Kamenka to see his sister A. Davydova contributed to the love that arose in childhood for folk tunes - Russian, and then Ukrainian, which Tchaikovsky often quotes in the works of the Moscow period of creativity.

In Moscow, the authority of Tchaikovsky as a composer is rapidly strengthening, his works are being published and performed. Tchaikovsky creates the first classical examples of various genres in Russian music - symphonies (1866, 1872, 1875, 1877), string quartet ( , , ), piano concerto ( , , ), ballet ("Swan Lake", 1875-76), concert instrumental piece("Melancholic Serenade" for violin and orchestra - 1875; "" for cello and orchestra - 1876), writes romances, piano works ("The Seasons", 1875-76, etc.).

A significant place in the composer's work was occupied by software symphonic works- fantasy overture " Romeo and Juliet"(1869), fantasy" Tempest"(1873, both - according to W. Shakespeare), fantasy" Francesca da Rimini"(according to Dante, 1876), in which the manifested in other genres is especially noticeable lyrical-psychological, dramatic orientation of Tchaikovsky's creativity.

In the opera, the search, following the same path, leads him from everyday drama to historical plot("Oprichnik" based on the tragedy by I. Lazhechnikov, 1870-72) through an appeal to N. Gogol's lyric-comedy and fantasy story ("The Blacksmith Vakula" - 1874, 2nd ed. - "" - 1885) to Pushkin's "Eugene Onegin "- lyrical scenes, as the composer (1877-78) called his opera.

"Eugene Onegin" and the Fourth Symphony, where the deep drama of human feelings is inseparable from the real signs of Russian life, became the result of the Moscow period of Tchaikovsky's work. Their completion marked the exit from a severe crisis caused by an overstrain of creative forces, as well as an unsuccessful marriage. Material support provided to Tchaikovsky by N. von Meck (correspondence with her, which lasted from 1876 to 1890, is invaluable material for study artistic views composer), gave him the opportunity to leave the work at the conservatory that weighed on him by that time and go abroad to improve his health.

Works of the late 70's - early 80's. marked by greater objectivity of expression, the continuing expansion of the range of genres in instrumental music (Concerto for violin and orchestra - 1878; orchestral suites -,,; Serenade for string orchestra - 1880; "Trio in Memory of the great artist" (N. Rubinstein) for piano, violin and cello - 1882, etc.), the scale of opera ideas ("The Maid of Orleans" by F. Schiller, 1879; "Mazeppa" by A. Pushkin, 1881-83), further improvement in the field of orchestral writing ("Italian Capriccio" - 1880, suites), musical form etc.

Since 1885, Tchaikovsky settled in the vicinity of Klin near Moscow (since 1891 - in Klin, where in 1895 the House-Museum of the composer was opened). The desire for solitude for creativity did not exclude deep and lasting contacts with Russian musical life, which developed intensively not only in Moscow and St. Petersburg, but also in Kyiv, Kharkov, Odessa, Tiflis, etc. Conducting performances that began in 1887 contributed to the widespread dissemination of music Tchaikovsky. Concert trips to Germany, the Czech Republic, France, England, America brought the composer worldwide fame; creative and friendly ties with European musicians are being strengthened (G. Bulow, A. Brodsky, A. Nikish, A. Dvorak, E. Grieg, C. Saint-Saens, G. Mahler, etc.). In 1893 Tchaikovsky was awarded the degree of Doctor of Music from the University of Cambridge in England.

In the works of the last period, opening program symphony" Manfred" (according to J. Byron, 1885), the opera " The Enchantress" (according to I. Shpazhinsky, 1885-87), the Fifth Symphony (1888), a noticeable strengthening of the tragic beginning, culminating in the absolute heights of the composer's work - the opera "The Queen of Spades "(1890) and the Sixth Symphony (1893), where he rises to the highest philosophical generalization of the images of love, life and death. Next to these works, the ballets The Sleeping Beauty (1889) and The Nutcracker (1892), the opera Iolanta (according to G. Hertz, 1891), culminating in the triumph of light and goodness, appear. A few days after the premiere of the Sixth Symphony in St. Petersburg, Tchaikovsky died suddenly.

Tchaikovsky's work covered almost all musical genres, among which the leading place is occupied by the largest - opera and symphony. They reflect the composer's artistic conception to the fullest extent, in the center of which are the deep processes of a person's inner world, the complex movements of the soul, revealed in sharp and intense dramatic collisions. However, even in these genres, the main intonation of Tchaikovsky's music is always heard - melodious, lyrical, born from direct expression human feeling and finds an equally immediate response from the listener. On the other hand, other genres - from romance or piano miniature to ballet, instrumental concerto or chamber ensemble - can be endowed with the same qualities of symphonic scale, complex dramatic development and deep lyrical insight.

Tchaikovsky also worked in the field of choral (including sacred) music, wrote vocal ensembles, music for dramatic performances. The traditions of Tchaikovsky in various genres have found their continuation in the work of S. Taneyev, A. Glazunov, S. Rachmaninov, A. Scriabin, and Soviet composers. Tchaikovsky's music, which gained recognition even during his lifetime, which, according to B. Asafiev, became a "vital necessity" for people, captured a huge era of Russian life and culture XIX century, went beyond them and became the property of all mankind. Its content is universal: it covers the images of life and death, love, nature, childhood, the surrounding life, it generalizes and reveals in a new way the images of Russian and world literature - Pushkin and Gogol, Shakespeare and Dante, Russian lyric poetry of the second half of XIX in.

The music of Tchaikovsky, embodying the precious qualities of Russian culture - love and compassion for a person, an extraordinary sensitivity to restless quests human soul, irreconcilability to evil and a passionate thirst for goodness, beauty, moral perfection - reveals deep connections with the work of L. Tolstoy and F. Dostoevsky, I. Turgenev and A. Chekhov.

Today, Tchaikovsky's dream of increasing the number of people who love his music is coming true. One of the testimonies of the world fame of the great Russian composer was the International Competition named after him, which attracts hundreds of musicians from different countries to Moscow.

E. Tsareva

musical position. Worldview. Milestones of the creative path

1

Unlike the composers of the "new Russian music school"- Balakirev, Mussorgsky, Borodin, Rimsky-Korsakov, who, for all the dissimilarity of their individual creative ways acted as representatives of a certain direction, united by a commonality of basic goals, objectives and aesthetic principles, Tchaikovsky did not belong to any groups and circles. In the complex interweaving and struggle of various trends that characterized Russian musical life in the second half of the 19th century, he maintained an independent position. Much brought him closer to the "Kuchkists" and caused mutual attraction, but there were disagreements between them, as a result of which a certain distance always remained in their relations.

One of the constant reproaches to Tchaikovsky, heard from the camp of the "Mighty Handful", was the lack of a clearly expressed national character of his music. “The national element is not always successful for Tchaikovsky,” Stasov cautiously remarks in his long review article “Our Music of the Last 25 Years.” On another occasion, uniting Tchaikovsky with A. Rubinstein, he directly states that both composers “are far from being full representatives of the new Russian musicians and their aspirations: both of them are not independent enough, and they are not strong enough and national enough.”

The opinion about Tchaikovsky's alienness to national Russian elements, about the excessively "Europeanized" and even "cosmopolitan" nature of his work was widely spread in his time and was expressed not only by critics who spoke on behalf of the "new Russian school". In a particularly sharp and straightforward form, it is expressed by M. M. Ivanov. “Of all Russian authors,” the critic wrote almost twenty years after the composer’s death, “he [Tchaikovsky] remained forever the most cosmopolitan, even when he tried to think in Russian, to approach the well-known features of the emerging Russian musical warehouse.” "The Russian manner of speaking, the Russian style - which we see, for example, in Rimsky-Korsakov - he does not have in sight ...".

For us, who perceive Tchaikovsky's music as an integral part of Russian culture, of the entire Russian spiritual heritage, such judgments sound wild and absurd. The author of "Eugene Onegin", constantly emphasizing his inextricable connection with the roots of Russian life and passionate love for everything Russian, never ceased to consider himself a representative of his native and blood close to him domestic art, whose fate deeply affected and worried him.

Like the "Kuchkists", Tchaikovsky was a convinced Glinkian and bowed before the greatness of the feat accomplished by the creator of "Life for the Tsar" and "Ruslan and Lyudmila". “An unprecedented phenomenon in the field of art”, “a real creative genius” - in such terms he spoke of Glinka. “Something overwhelming, gigantic,” similar to which “neither Mozart, nor Gluck, nor any of the masters has,” was heard by Tchaikovsky in the final chorus of “A Life for the Tsar,” which put its author “along with (Yes! along with!) Mozart , with Beethoven and with anyone." "No less manifestation of extraordinary genius" found Tchaikovsky in "Kamarinskaya". His words that the entire Russian symphony school “is in Kamarinskaya, just like the whole oak tree is in the acorn,” became winged. “And for a long time,” he argued, “Russian authors will draw from this rich source, because it takes a lot of time and a lot of effort to exhaust all its wealth.”

But being as much a national artist as any of the "Kuchkists", Tchaikovsky solved the problem of the folk and the national in his work in a different way and reflected other aspects of national reality. Most of the composers of The Mighty Handful, in search of an answer to the questions put forward by modernity, turned to the origins of Russian life, whether significant events historical past, epic, legend or ancient folk customs and ideas about the world. It cannot be said that Tchaikovsky was completely uninterested in all this. “... I have not yet met a person who is more in love with Mother Russia in general than I am,” he once wrote, “and in her Great Russian parts in particular<...>I passionately love a Russian person, Russian speech, Russian mentality, Russian beauty of faces, Russian customs. Lermontov directly says that dark antiquity cherished legends his souls do not move. And I even love it.”

But the main subject of Tchaikovsky's creative interest was not broad historical movements or the collective foundations of folk life, but the internal psychological collisions of the spiritual world of the human person. Therefore, the individual prevails in him over the universal, the lyric over the epic. With great power, depth and sincerity, he reflected in his music that rise in personal self-consciousness, that thirst for the liberation of the individual from everything that fetters the possibility of its full, unhindered disclosure and self-affirmation, which were characteristic of Russian society in the post-reform period. The element of the personal, the subjective, is always present in Tchaikovsky, no matter what topics he addresses. Hence the special lyrical warmth and penetration that are fanned in his works by pictures of folk life or the Russian nature he loves, and, on the other hand, sharpness and tension dramatic conflicts that arose from the contradiction between the natural desire of a person for the fullness of enjoying life and the harsh ruthless reality against which it breaks.

Differences in the general direction of the work of Tchaikovsky and the composers of the “new Russian musical school” also determined some of the features of their musical language and style, in particular, their approach to the implementation of folk song thematics. For all of them, the folk song served as a rich source of new, nationally unique means of musical expression. But if the "Kuchkists" sought to discover in folk melodies the ancient features inherent in it and to find the methods of harmonic processing corresponding to them, then Tchaikovsky perceived the folk song as a direct element of the living surrounding reality. Therefore, he did not try to separate the true basis in it from the one introduced later, in the process of migration and transition to a different social environment, he did not separate the traditional peasant song from the urban one, which underwent transformation under the influence of romance intonations, dance rhythms, etc. melody, he processed it freely, subordinated it to his personal individual perception.

A certain prejudice on the part of the "Mighty Handful" manifested itself towards Tchaikovsky and as a pupil of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, which they considered a stronghold of conservatism and academic routine in music. Tchaikovsky is the only Russian composer of the "sixties" generation who received a systematic professional education within the walls of a special musical educational institution. Rimsky-Korsakov later had to fill in the gaps in his professional training, when, having started teaching musical and theoretical disciplines at the conservatory, in his own words, "became one of its best students." And it is quite natural that it was Tchaikovsky and Rimsky-Korsakov who were the creators of the two largest composer schools in Russia in the second half of the 19th century, conditionally called "Moscow" and "Petersburg".

The conservatory not only armed Tchaikovsky with the necessary knowledge, but also instilled in him that strict discipline of labor, thanks to which he could create, in a short period of active creative activity, many works of the most diverse genre and character, enriching various areas of Russian musical art. Constant, systematic compositional work Tchaikovsky considered the obligatory duty of every true artist who takes his vocation seriously and responsibly. Only that music, - he notes, - can touch, shock and hurt, which poured out from the depths of the artistic soul excited by inspiration.<...>Meanwhile, you always need to work, and a real honest artist cannot sit idly by under the pretext that he is not in the mood.

Conservative upbringing also contributed to the development in Tchaikovsky of a respectful attitude to tradition, to the heritage of the great classical masters which, however, was in no way connected with a prejudice against the new. Laroche recalled the "silent protest" with which the young Tchaikovsky treated the desire of some teachers to "protect" their pupils from the "dangerous" influences of Berlioz, Liszt, Wagner, keeping them within the framework of classical norms. Later, the same Laroche wrote as about a strange misunderstanding about the attempts of some critics to attribute Tchaikovsky to composers of a conservative traditionalist direction and argued that "Mr. Tchaikovsky is incomparably closer to the extreme left of the musical parliament than to the moderate right." The difference between him and the "Kuchkists", in his opinion, is more "quantitative" than "qualitative".

Laroche's judgments, despite their polemical sharpness, are largely fair. No matter how sharp the disagreements and disputes between Tchaikovsky and the Mighty Handful sometimes took, they reflected the complexity and diversity of paths within the fundamentally united progressive democratic camp of Russian musicians of the second half of the 19th century.

Close ties connected Tchaikovsky with the entire Russian artistic culture during its high classical heyday. A passionate lover of reading, he knew Russian literature very well and closely followed everything new that appeared in it, often expressing very interesting and thoughtful judgments about individual works. Bowing to the genius of Pushkin, whose poetry played a huge role in his own work, Tchaikovsky loved a lot from Turgenev, subtly felt and understood Fet's lyrics, which did not prevent him from admiring the richness of descriptions of life and nature from such an objective writer as Aksakov.

But he assigned a very special place to L. N. Tolstoy, whom he called "the greatest of all artistic geniuses" that mankind has ever known. In the works of the great novelist Tchaikovsky was especially attracted by "some higher love for man, supreme a pity to his helplessness, finiteness and insignificance. “The writer, who gifted to no one before him the power not bestowed from above to force us, meager in mind, to comprehend the most impenetrable nooks and crannies of the recesses of our moral being”, “the deepest heart-seller”, - in such expressions he wrote about what, in his opinion, amounted to , strength and greatness of Tolstoy as an artist. “He alone is enough,” according to Tchaikovsky, “so that the Russian person does not bow his head in shame when all the great things that Europe has created are calculated before him.”

More complex was his attitude towards Dostoevsky. Recognizing his genius, the composer did not feel such inner closeness to him as to Tolstoy. If, reading Tolstoy, he could shed tears of blessed admiration because "through his mediation touched with the world of the ideal, absolute goodness and humanity”, then the “cruel talent” of the author of The Brothers Karamazov suppressed and even frightened him.

Of the writers of the younger generation, Tchaikovsky had a special sympathy for Chekhov, in whose stories and novels he was attracted by a combination of merciless realism with lyrical warmth and poetry. This sympathy was, as you know, mutual. Chekhov's attitude to Tchaikovsky is eloquently evidenced by his letter to the composer's brother, where he admitted that "he is ready day and night to stand guard of honor at the porch of the house where Pyotr Ilyich lives" - so great was his admiration for the musician, to whom he assigned second place in Russian art, immediately after Leo Tolstoy. This assessment of Tchaikovsky by one of the greatest domestic masters of the word testifies to what the composer's music was for the best progressive Russian people of his time.

2

Tchaikovsky belonged to the type of artists in whom the personal and the creative, the human and the artistic are so closely linked and intertwined that it is almost impossible to separate one from the other. Everything that worried him in life, caused pain or joy, indignation or sympathy, he sought to express in his writings in a language close to him. musical sounds. The subjective and the objective, the personal and the impersonal are inseparable in Tchaikovsky's work. This allows us to speak of lyricism as the main form of his artistic thinking, but in the broad meaning that Belinsky attached to this concept. "All general, everything substantial, every idea, every thought - the main engines of the world and life, - he wrote, - can form the content lyrical work, but on the condition, however, that the general be translated into the subject's blood property, enter into his sensation, be connected not with any one side of him, but with the whole integrity of his being. Everything that occupies, excites, pleases, saddens, delights, calms, disturbs, in a word, everything that makes up the content of the spiritual life of the subject, everything that enters into it, arises in it - all this is accepted by the lyric as its legitimate property. .

Lyricism as a form of artistic comprehension of the world, Belinsky further explains, is not only a special, independent kind of art, the scope of its manifestation is wider: “lyricism, existing on its own, as separate genus poetry, enters into all others, like an element, lives them, like the fire of Prometheus, lives all the creations of Zeus ... The preponderance of the lyrical element also happens in the epic, and in the drama.

The breath of sincere and direct lyrical feeling fanned all the works of Tchaikovsky, from intimate vocal or piano miniatures to symphonies and operas, which by no means excludes neither depth of thought nor strong and vivid drama. The work of a lyric artist is the broader in content, the richer his personality and the more diverse the range of her interests, the more responsive his nature is to the impressions of the surrounding reality. Tchaikovsky was interested in many things and reacted sharply to everything that happened around him. It can be argued that there was not a single major and significant event in his contemporary life that would leave him indifferent and did not cause one or another response from him.

By nature and way of thinking, he was a typical Russian intellectual of his time - a time of deep transformative processes, great hopes and expectations, and equally bitter disappointments and losses. One of the main features of Tchaikovsky as a person is the insatiable restlessness of the spirit, characteristic of many leading figures. national culture in that era. The composer himself defined this feature as "longing for the ideal." All his life, he intensely, sometimes painfully, sought a firm spiritual support, turning now to philosophy, now to religion, but he could not bring his views on the world, on the place and purpose of man in it into a single complete system. "... I do not find in my soul the strength to develop any strong convictions, because I, like a weather vane, turn between traditional religion and the arguments of a critical mind," admitted the thirty-seven-year-old Tchaikovsky. The same motive sounds in a diary entry made ten years later: “Life passes, comes to an end, but I didn’t think of anything, I even disperse it, if there are fatal questions, I leave them.”

Feeding an irresistible antipathy to all kinds of doctrinairism and dry rationalistic abstractions, Tchaikovsky was relatively little interested in various philosophical systems, but he knew the works of some philosophers and expressed his attitude towards them. He categorically condemned the philosophy of Schopenhauer, then fashionable in Russia. “In the final conclusions of Schopenhauer,” he finds, “there is something offensive to human dignity, something dry and selfish, not warmed by love for humanity.” The harshness of this review is understandable. The artist, who described himself as “a man passionately loving life (despite all its hardships) and equally passionately hating death,” could not accept and share philosophy, who argued that only the transition to non-existence, self-destruction serves as a deliverance from world evil.

On the contrary, Spinoza's philosophy evoked sympathy from Tchaikovsky and attracted him with its humanity, attention and love for man, which allowed the composer to compare the Dutch thinker with Leo Tolstoy. The atheistic essence of Spinoza's views did not go unnoticed by him either. “I forgot then,” notes Tchaikovsky, recalling his recent dispute with von Meck, “that there could be people like Spinoza, Goethe, Kant, who managed to do without religion? I forgot then that, not to mention these colossi, there is an abyss of people who have managed to create for themselves a harmonious system of ideas that have replaced religion for them.

These lines were written in 1877, when Tchaikovsky considered himself an atheist. A year later, he even more resolutely declared that the dogmatic side of Orthodoxy "has long been subjected to criticism in me that is deadly for him." But in the early 1980s, a turning point took place in his attitude to religion. “... The light of faith penetrates into my soul more and more,” he confessed in a letter to von Meck from Paris dated March 16/28, 1881, “... I feel that I am more and more inclined towards this only stronghold ours against all disasters. I feel that I am beginning to know how to love God, which I did not know before. True, the remark immediately slips through: "doubts still visit me." But the composer tries with all the strength of his soul to drown out these doubts and drives them away from himself.

Tchaikovsky's religious views remained complex and ambiguous, based more on emotional stimuli than on deep and firm conviction. Some of the tenets of the Christian faith were still unacceptable to him. “I am not so imbued with religion,” he notes in one of the letters, “to see with confidence the beginning of a new life in death.” The idea of ​​eternal heavenly bliss seemed to Tchaikovsky something extremely dull, empty and joyless: “Life is then charming when it consists of alternating joys and sorrows, of the struggle between good and evil, of light and shadow, in a word, of diversity in unity. How can you imagine eternal life in the form of endless bliss.

In 1887, Tchaikovsky wrote in his diary: religion I would like to expound mine sometime in detail, if only in order to myself once and for all understand my beliefs and the boundary where they begin after speculation. However, Tchaikovsky apparently failed to bring his religious views into a single system and resolve all their contradictions.

He was attracted to Christianity mainly by the moral humanistic side, the gospel image of Christ was perceived by Tchaikovsky as living and real, endowed with ordinary human qualities. “Although He was God,” we read in one of diary entries- but at the same time a person. He suffered, as did we. We sorry him, we love in him his ideal human sides." The idea of ​​the almighty and formidable God of hosts was for Tchaikovsky something distant, difficult to understand and inspires fear rather than trust and hope.

The great humanist Tchaikovsky, highest value for whom there was a human personality conscious of its dignity and its duty to others, he did not think much about the issues of the social structure of life. Political views his were moderate enough and did not go beyond thoughts of constitutional monarchy. “How Russia would revive,” he remarks one day, “if the sovereign (meaning Alexander II) ended his amazing reign by granting us political rights! Let them not say that we have not matured to constitutional forms.” Sometimes this idea of ​​a constitution and popular representation in Tchaikovsky took the form of the idea of ​​a zemstvo sobor, widespread in the 1970s and 1980s, shared by various circles of society from the liberal intelligentsia to the Narodnaya Volya revolutionaries.

Far from sympathizing with any revolutionary ideals, at the same time, Tchaikovsky was hard pressed by the ever-increasing rampant reaction in Russia and condemned the cruel government terror aimed at suppressing the slightest glimpse of discontent and free thought. In 1878, at the time of the peak and growth of the Narodnaya Volya movement, he wrote: “We are going through a terrible time, and when you start to think about what is happening, it becomes terrible. On the one hand, the completely dumbfounded government, so lost that Aksakov is cited for a bold, truthful word; on the other hand, the unfortunate crazy youth, exiled by the thousands without trial or investigation to where the raven did not bring the bones - and among these two extremes of indifference to everything, the mass mired in selfish interests, without any protest looking at one or the other.

This kind of critical statements are repeatedly found in Tchaikovsky's letters and later. In 1882, shortly after the accession of Alexander III, accompanied by a new intensification of reaction, the same motive sounds in them: “For our dear heart, although a sad fatherland, a very gloomy time has come. Everyone feels a vague unease and discontent; everyone feels that the state of affairs is fragile and changes must take place - but nothing can be foreseen. In 1890, the same motive sounds again in his correspondence: “... something is wrong in Russia now ... The spirit of reaction reaches the point that the writings of Count. L. Tolstoy are persecuted as some kind of revolutionary proclamations. The youth is revolting, and the Russian atmosphere is, in fact, very gloomy.” All this, of course, influenced the general state of mind of Tchaikovsky, exacerbated the feeling of discord with reality and gave rise to an internal protest, which was also reflected in his work.

A man of broad versatile intellectual interests, an artist-thinker, Tchaikovsky was constantly weighed down by a deep, intense thought about the meaning of life, his place and purpose in it, about imperfection. human relations and about many other things that made him think about contemporary reality. The composer could not but worry about the general fundamental questions concerning the foundations of artistic creativity, the role of art in people's lives and the ways of its development, on which such sharp and heated disputes were conducted in his time. When Tchaikovsky answered the questions addressed to him that music should be written “as God puts on the soul,” this manifested his irresistible antipathy to any kind of abstract theorizing, and even more so to the approval of any obligatory dogmatic rules and norms in art. . So, reproaching Wagner for forcibly subordinating his work to an artificial and far-fetched theoretical concept, he remarks: “Wagner, in my opinion, killed the enormous creative power in himself with theory. Any preconceived theory cools the immediate creative feeling.

Appreciating in music, first of all, sincerity, truthfulness and immediacy of expression, Tchaikovsky avoided loud declarative statements and proclaiming his tasks and principles for their implementation. But this does not mean that he did not think about them at all: his aesthetic convictions were quite firm and consistent. In the most general form, they can be reduced to two main provisions: 1) democracy, the belief that art should be addressed to a wide range of people, serve as a means of their spiritual development and enrichment, 2) the unconditional truth of life. The well-known and often quoted words of Tchaikovsky: “I would wish with all the strength of my soul that my music spread, that the number of people who love it, find comfort and support in it” would increase, were a manifestation of a non-vain pursuit of popularity at all costs, but the composer's inherent need to communicate with people through his art, the desire to bring them joy, to strengthen the strength and good spirits.

Tchaikovsky constantly talks about the truth of the expression. At the same time, he sometimes showed a negative attitude towards the word "realism". This is explained by the fact that he perceived it in a superficial, vulgar Pisarev interpretation, as excluding sublime beauty and poetry. He considered the main thing in art not external naturalistic plausibility, but the depth of comprehension of the inner meaning of things and, above all, those subtle and complex psychological processes hidden from a superficial glance that occur in the human soul. It is music, in his opinion, more than any other of the arts, that has this ability. “In an artist,” wrote Tchaikovsky, “there is absolute truth, not in a banal protocol sense, but in a higher one, opening up some unknown horizons to us, some inaccessible spheres where only music can penetrate, and no one has gone so far between writers. like Tolstoy."

Tchaikovsky was not alien to the tendency to romantic idealization, to the free play of fantasy and fabulous fiction, to the world of the wonderful, magical and unprecedented. But the center of the composer's creative attention has always been a living a real man with his simple but strong feelings, joys, sorrows and hardships. That sharp psychological vigilance, spiritual sensitivity and responsiveness with which Tchaikovsky was endowed allowed him to create unusually vivid, vitally truthful and convincing images that we perceive as close, understandable and similar to us. This puts him on a par with such great representatives of Russian classical realism as Pushkin, Turgenev, Tolstoy or Chekhov.

3

It can be rightly said about Tchaikovsky that the era in which he lived, a time of high social upsurge and great fruitful changes in all areas of Russian life, made him a composer. When a young official of the Ministry of Justice and an amateur musician, having entered the St. Petersburg Conservatory, which had just opened in 1862, soon decided to devote himself to music, this caused not only surprise, but also disapproval among many people close to him. Not devoid of a certain risk, Tchaikovsky's act was not, however, accidental and thoughtless. A few years earlier, Mussorgsky had retired from military service for the same purpose, against the advice and persuasion of his older friends. Both brilliant young people were prompted to take this step by the attitude towards art, which is affirming in society, as a serious and important matter that contributes to the spiritual enrichment of people and the multiplication of national cultural heritage.

Tchaikovsky's entry into the path of professional music was associated with a profound change in his views and habits, attitude to life and work. The composer's younger brother and first biographer M. I. Tchaikovsky recalled how even his appearance had changed after entering the conservatory: in other respects." With the demonstrative carelessness of the toilet, Tchaikovsky wanted to emphasize his decisive break with the former nobility and bureaucratic environment and the transformation from a polished secular man into a worker-raznochintsy.

In a little over three years of study at the conservatory, where A. G. Rubinshtein was one of his main mentors and leaders, Tchaikovsky mastered all the necessary theoretical disciplines and wrote a number of symphonic and chamber works, although not yet completely independent and uneven, but marked by extraordinary talent. The largest of these was the cantata "To Joy" on the words of Schiller's ode, performed at the solemn graduation act on December 31, 1865. Shortly thereafter, Tchaikovsky's friend and classmate Laroche wrote to him: "You are the greatest musical talent modern Russia... I see in you the greatest or, better, the only hope of our musical future... However, everything you have done... I consider only the work of a schoolboy, preparatory and experimental, so to speak. Your creations will begin, perhaps, only in five years, but they, mature, classical, will surpass everything that we had after Glinka.

Independent creative activity Tchaikovsky was deployed in the second half of the 60s in Moscow, where he moved in early 1866 at the invitation of N. G. Rubinshtein to teach in the music classes of the RMS, and then at the Moscow Conservatory, which opened in the autumn of the same year. “... For P. I. Tchaikovsky,” as one of his new Moscow friends N. D. Kashkin testifies, “for many years she became that artistic family in whose environment his talent grew and developed.” The young composer met with sympathy and support not only in musical, but also in literary and theater circles then Moscow. Acquaintance with A. N. Ostrovsky and some of the leading actors of the Maly Theater contributed to Tchaikovsky’s growing interest in folk songs and ancient Russian life, which was reflected in his works of these years (the opera The Voyevoda based on Ostrovsky’s play, the First Symphony Winter Dreams) .

The period of unusually rapid and intensive growth of his creative talent was the 70s. “There is such a pile of preoccupation,” he wrote, “which wraps around so much during the height of work that you do not have time to take care of yourself and forget everything except what is directly related to work.” In this state of genuine obsession with Tchaikovsky, three symphonies, two piano and violin concertos, three operas, the Swan Lake ballet, three quartets and a number of others, including quite large and significant works, were created before 1878. If we add to this a large, time-consuming pedagogical work at the conservatory and continued collaboration in Moscow newspapers as a music columnist until the mid-1970s, then one is involuntarily struck by the enormous energy and inexhaustible flow of his inspiration.

The creative pinnacle of this period were two masterpieces - "Eugene Onegin" and the Fourth Symphony. Their creation coincided with an acute mental crisis that brought Tchaikovsky to the brink of suicide. The immediate impetus for this shock was the marriage to a woman, the impossibility life together with which the composer was aware from the very first days. However, the crisis was prepared by the totality of the conditions of his life and the heap over a number of years. “An unsuccessful marriage accelerated the crisis,” B.V. Asafiev rightly notes, “because Tchaikovsky, having made a mistake in counting on the creation of a new, more creatively more favorable - family - environment in these living conditions, quickly broke free - to complete creative freedom. That this crisis was not of a morbid nature, but was prepared by the entire impetuous development of the composer's work and the feeling of the greatest creative upsurge, is shown by the result of this nervous outburst: the opera Eugene Onegin and the famous Fourth Symphony.

When the severity of the crisis abated somewhat, the time came for a critical analysis and revision of the entire path traveled, which dragged on for years. This process was accompanied by bouts of sharp dissatisfaction with himself: more and more often complaints are heard in Tchaikovsky's letters about the lack of skill, immaturity and imperfection of everything he has written so far; sometimes it seems to him that he is exhausted, exhausted and will no longer be able to create anything of any significance. A more sober and calm self-assessment is contained in a letter to von Meck dated May 25-27, 1882: “... An undoubted change has occurred in me. There is no longer that lightness, that pleasure in work, thanks to which days and hours flew by unnoticed for me. I console myself with the fact that if my subsequent writings are less warmed by true feeling than the previous ones, then they will win in texture, will be more deliberate, more mature.

The period from the end of the 1970s to the middle of the 1980s in Tchaikovsky's development can be defined as a period of searching and accumulation of strength to master new great artistic tasks. His creative activity did not decrease during these years. Thanks to the financial support of von Meck, Tchaikovsky was able to free himself from his burdensome work in the theoretical classes of the Moscow Conservatory and devote himself entirely to composing music. A number of works come out from under his pen, perhaps not possessing such a captivating dramatic power and intensity of expression as Romeo and Juliet, Francesca or the Fourth Symphony, such a charm of warm soulful lyricism and poetry as Eugene Onegin, but masterful, impeccable in form and texture, written with great imagination, witty and inventive, and often with genuine brilliance. These are the three magnificent orchestral suites and some other symphonic works of these years. The operas The Maid of Orleans and Mazeppa, created at the same time, are distinguished by their breadth of forms, their desire for sharp, tense dramatic situations, although they suffer from some internal contradictions and a lack of artistic integrity.

Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Born on April 25 (May 7), 1840 in Votkinsk, Vyatka province, Russian empire- died October 25 (November 6), 1893 in St. Petersburg. Russian composer, conductor, teacher, musical and public figure, music journalist.

Considered one of the greatest composers in the history of music.

His concertos and other works for pianoforte, seven symphonies (six numbered and the symphony "Manfred"), four suites, program symphonic music, ballets "Swan Lake", "Sleeping Beauty", "The Nutcracker", more than 100 romances represent an extremely valuable contribution to world musical culture.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in a village at the Kamsko-Votkinsky plant in the Vyatka province (now the city of Votkinsk, Udmurtia).

His father - Ilya Petrovich Tchaikovsky (1795-1880) - an outstanding Russian engineer, was the son of Pyotr Fedorovich Chaika, who was born in 1745 in the village of Nikolaevka of the Poltava regiment, near the city of Poltava.

Tchaikovsky came from the Orthodox gentry of the Kremenchug district and was a descendant of the well-known Cossack family of Chaek in Ukraine.

Family tradition claimed that his great-grandfather Fyodor Afanasyevich Chaika (1695-1767) participated in the Battle of Poltava and died in the rank of centurion "from wounds", although in fact he died already in old age in Catherine's time.

The composer's grandfather, Pyotr Fedorovich, was the second son of Fyodor Chaika and his wife Anna (1717-?). He studied at the Kiev-Mohyla Academy, from where in 1769 he transferred to the St. Petersburg military land hospital. In Kyiv, he "ennobled" his surname, starting to be called Tchaikovsky. Since 1770, in the Russian-Turkish war (healer's apprentice, assistant doctor, then doctor). In 1776 he was appointed a city doctor in Kungur, Perm governorate, in 1782 he was transferred to Vyatka, two years later he was promoted to the headquarters doctor and then granted the title of nobility.

Subsequently, he retired, in 1795 he was appointed mayor in the city of Slobodskoy, soon transferred from there to Glazov, where he held the post until his death in 1818. In 1776, he married 25-year-old Anastasia Stepanovna Possokhova, who had recently lost her father (her father, a second lieutenant, died near Kungur in a skirmish with the Pugachevites; family tradition called him the commandant of Kungur, allegedly hanged by Pugachev). They had 11 children.

Ilya Petrovich, the composer's father, was the tenth child. After graduating from the Mining Cadet Corps in St. Petersburg, he was enlisted in the Department of Mining and Salt Affairs. Widowed after a short marriage, in 1833 he married 20-year-old Alexandra Andreevna Assier (1813-1854), the granddaughter of the French sculptor Michel Victor Acier, a modeller of a porcelain manufactory in Meissen (Saxony), and the daughter of a major customs official Andrei Mikhailovich (Michael-Heinrich-Maximilian) Assier, who came to Russia as a teacher of French and German language and in 1800 he took Russian citizenship.

In 1837, Ilya Petrovich Tchaikovsky and his young wife moved to the Urals, where he was appointed to the post of head of the Kamsko-Votkinsky steel plant. Peter was the second child in the family: in 1838 his older brother Nikolai was born, in 1842 his sister Alexandra (married Davydova) and Ippolit. The twin brothers Anatoly and Modest were born in 1850.

Pyotr Ilyich's parents loved music. His mother played the piano and sang, there was a mechanical organ in the house - an orchestra, in the performance of which little Peter first heard Don Juan.

While the family lived in Votkinsk, they often heard melodic folk songs factory workers and peasants.

In 1849 the family moved to the city of Alapaevsk, and in 1850 to St. Petersburg. Feeling inferior in status due to their modest origins, in 1850, their parents sent Tchaikovsky to the Imperial School of Law, located near the street that now bears the composer's name.

Tchaikovsky spent 2 years abroad, 1300 km from his home, since the age of admission to the school was 12 years. For Tchaikovsky, separation from his mother was a very strong emotional trauma.

In 1852, having entered the school, he began to seriously study music, which was taught as an elective. Tchaikovsky was known as a good pianist and improvised well. From the age of 16, he began to pay more attention to music, studying with the famous teacher Luigi Piccioli. Then Rudolf Kündinger became the mentor of the future composer.

After graduating from college in 1859, Tchaikovsky received the rank of titular councilor and began working in the Ministry of Justice. In his free time, he visited the opera house, where he was strongly impressed by the performances of operas by Mozart and Glinka.

In 1861 he entered Music classes Russian Musical Society (RMO), and after their transformation in 1862 into the St. Petersburg Conservatory, he became one of its first students in the composition class. His teachers at the conservatory were Nikolai Ivanovich Zaremba (music theory) and Anton Grigoryevich Rubinshtein (orchestration).

At the insistence of the latter, he left the service and devoted himself entirely to music. In 1865 he graduated from the conservatory course with a large silver medal, having written a cantata to the ode "To Joy"; his other conservatory works are the overture to Ostrovsky's play "Thunderstorm" and the dances of the hay girls, which were later included in the opera "Voevoda".

After graduating from the conservatory, at the invitation of Nikolai Rubinstein, he moved to Moscow, where he received a position as professor of free composition, harmony, theory and instrumentation classes at the newly founded conservatory.

In 1868 he first appeared in print as musical critic and got acquainted with a group of St. Petersburg composers - members of the "Mighty Handful". Despite the difference in creative views, friendly relations developed between him and the "Kuchkists". Tchaikovsky shows interest in program music, and on the advice of the head of the Mighty Handful, Mily Balakirev, he writes a fantasy overture "Romeo and Juliet" based on the tragedy of the same name by Shakespeare (1869), and the critic V.V. Stasov suggested to him the idea of ​​the symphonic fantasy The Tempest (1873).

In the same year he met Desiree Artaud. He dedicated the Romance op. 5 and allegedly encoded her name in the texts of Piano Concerto No. 1 and the symphonic poem Fatum. They planned to marry, but on September 15, 1869, Desire unexpectedly married the Spanish baritone singer Mariano Padilla y Ramos. Nineteen years later, in October 1888, at the request of Desire, Tchaikovsky wrote Six Romances Op. 65.

The 1870s in the work of Tchaikovsky is a period of creative quest; he is attracted by the historical past of Russia, Russian folk life, the theme of human destiny.

At this time, he wrote such works as the Oprichnik and Blacksmith Vakula operas, music for Ostrovsky's drama The Snow Maiden, the ballet Swan Lake, the Second and Third Symphonies, the fantasy Francesca da Rimini, the First piano concert, Variations on a Rococo theme for cello and orchestra, three string quartets and others.

To the same period belongs a commissioned organizing committee Polytechnic exhibition of the cantata "In memory of the 200th anniversary of the birth of Peter the Great" to the words of Ya. P. Polonsky, it was first performed on May 31, 1872 on the Trinity Bridge in the Kremlin under a specially built canopy (conductor K. Yu. Davydov, soloist A. M. . Dodonov).

From 1872 to 1876 he worked as a music critic in the newspaper Russkiye Vedomosti, which had a reputation as a left-liberal press organ.

In July 1877, carried away by the composition of the opera "Eugene Onegin", impulsively married former Conservatory student Antonina Milyukova who was 8 years younger than him. He wrote to his brother that one of the purposes of marriage was to get rid of accusations of homosexuality: “I would like to marry or generally openly communicate with a woman to shut the mouths of any despicable creature, whose opinion I do not value at all, but which can cause grief to people close to me”. However, the composer's homosexuality caused the marriage to break up after a few weeks, according to a number of art historians, this fact of the biography was reflected in his work. Due to various circumstances, the couple could never get a divorce and lived separately.

In 1878 he left his post at the Moscow Conservatory and went abroad. Moral and material support during this period was provided by Nadezhda von Meck, with whom Tchaikovsky had extensive correspondence in 1876-1890, but never met. Von Meck is dedicated to one of Tchaikovsky's works of this period - the Fourth Symphony (1877).

In 1880 for an overture "1812" Tchaikovsky received the Order of St. Vladimir I degree.

Tchaikovsky - 1812

In May 1881, he asked for the issuance of three thousand rubles in silver from the state funds on loan: "that is, so that my debt to the treasury is gradually repaid by the per-performance payment due to me from the directorate of the Imperial Theaters." The request was addressed to the emperor, but the letter itself was sent to the chief prosecutor of the Holy Synod - in view of the fact that the latter was "the only one of the dignitaries close to the Sovereign, to whom I have the honor to be personally known." Tchaikovsky explained the reason for his conversion as follows: “This amount would free me from debts (made out of necessity both by my own and some of my relatives) and would return to me that peace of mind that my soul longs for”. According to the chief prosecutor's report, the emperor sent Pobedonostsev 3,000 rubles for Tchaikovsky as an irrevocable allowance.

In the mid-1880s, Tchaikovsky returned to active musical and social activities. In 1885 he was elected director of the Moscow branch of the RMO. Tchaikovsky's music is gaining popularity in Russia and abroad.

From the late 1880s he performed as a conductor in Russia and abroad. Concert trips strengthened Tchaikovsky's creative and friendly ties with Western European musicians, including Hans von Bülow, Edvard Grieg, Antonin Dvorak, Gustav Mahler, Arthur Nikisch, Camille Saint-Saens and others.

In the spring of 1891, P. I. Tchaikovsky made a trip to the USA. As a conductor of his works, he performed with sensational success in New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia ( detailed description this journey is preserved in the composer's diaries). In New York he conducted the New York symphony orchestra at the opening of Carnegie Hall.

For the last time in his life, Tchaikovsky stood at the conductor's stand in St. Petersburg nine days before his death - on October 16 (October 28, according to a new style), 1893. In the second part of this concert, his Sixth, "Pathetic" symphony was first performed.

The composer spent the last years of his life in the vicinity of the city of Klin near Moscow, including in the preserved house, where his museum is now located.

Back in 1873, the following lines appeared in Tchaikovsky's diary during a trip to Switzerland: “Among these majestically beautiful views and impressions of a tourist, I aspire to Russia with all my heart, and my heart shrinks at the presentation of its plains, meadows, groves ...” With age, this feeling and the desire to live and create outside the bustle of the city intensified and the 47-year-old composer wrote: “The closer you move to old age, the more vividly you feel the pleasures of being close to nature”.

Not wanting to live permanently in Moscow or St. Petersburg and not having the means to buy his own housing, Tchaikovsky was looking for a house for rent in a secluded quiet place near Moscow, so that after tiring tours he could devote himself completely to creativity. The first choice fell on the Maidanovo estate not far from Klin.

On February 16, 1885, he writes to N. F. von Meck from “his hiding place”: “What happiness to be at home! What bliss to know that no one will come, will not interfere with studies, or reading, or walks! ... I now understood once and for all that my dream to settle for the rest of the century in the Russian countryside is not a fleeting whim, but a real need of my nature ". The house stood on the high bank of the Sestra River in a picturesque park. The proximity of the railway made it possible to go to one of the capitals at any time for urgent matters (in February 1885, Pyotr Ilyich was elected one of the directors of the Moscow branch of the Russian Musical Society).

Every day from 9 am to 1 pm Tchaikovsky worked. After dinner, in any weather, he went for a two-hour walk with an indispensable notebook for sketching musical thoughts and themes.

Having come into contact with the living conditions of local peasants, the composer agreed with the parish priest, a graduate of the Bethany Theological Seminary, E. S. Bogolyubsky, to open a school in Maidanov, for the maintenance of which he donated money.

On June 24, 1885, the composer was an eyewitness and even helped residents extinguish a fire that destroyed one and a half hundred houses and shopping malls in Klin.

From Maidanov, Tchaikovsky, at the invitation of his student composer S.I. Taneyev, repeatedly walked to the nearby Demyanovo estate, which was acquired in 1883 by the philosopher and sociologist V.I. Taneyev.

Tchaikovsky lived in the Maidan estate of the ruined landowner, state councilor N. V. Novikova from the beginning of February 1885 to December 1887. Here he worked on a new version of the opera The Blacksmith Vakula (Cherevichki), the symphony Manfred, the opera Enchantress" and other works.

In his creative work, Tchaikovsky was helped by the library he had collected, which he did not part with, despite frequent moves, and in which not only the scores of the works of his favorite composers were presented, but also works by Russian and foreign classics literature and philosophy. In the spring of 1888, Tchaikovsky, whose summer solitude was hindered by numerous summer residents, rented “a new refuge ... again near Klin, but in an area much more picturesque and beautiful than Maidanovo. Moreover, there is only one house, one estate, and I will not see hated summer residents walking under my windows, as it was in Maidanov. This place is called the village of Frolovsky".

The house that stood apart, furnished with antique furniture, a beautiful view of the wide distances and a neglected garden turning into a forest, turned out to be to the heart of the composer: “I am completely in love with Frolovskoye. The whole local area seems to me heavenly paradise ". From Frolovsky, Tchaikovsky traveled to another estate, Spas-Korkodino, located not far from Klin, to visit its owner S. I. Fonvizin, who was married to Vera Petrovna Bers, Sofya Andreevna Tolstaya's niece.

In Frolovsky, Tchaikovsky wrote the overture Hamlet, the Fifth Symphony, the ballet The Sleeping Beauty, the opera The Queen of Spades. To the chagrin of Tchaikovsky, the forest surrounding the estate, which belonged to her mistress L.A. Panina, who constantly lived in Bessarabia, gradually began to be cut down. The house was dilapidated and required funds for repairs. I had to part with Frolovsky.

In May 1891, the composer returned to Maidanovo, where he lived for exactly a year and where the opera Ioalanta and the ballet were written during this period. "Nutcracker".

On May 5, 1892, Tchaikovsky moved from Maidanov to Klin to a house at the very end of the city, on the Moscow highway. The Klin period of the composer's life was marked by important milestones in the international recognition of his work: in November 1892, Tchaikovsky was elected a corresponding member of the Paris Academy of Fine Arts, and in June 1893, an honorary doctor of Cambridge University.

In Klin, he worked on the final proofreading of the scores of Iolanta and The Nutcracker, and created numerous plays and romances. One of the last works written here - the Third Piano Concerto is dated October 1893. Here, in February - March 1893, the instrumentation was written in sketches and the instrumentation was completed in the summer "Sixth Symphony", about which the composer wrote: “In this symphony, without exaggeration, I put my whole soul.”

Tchaikovsky conducted its first performance on October 16, 1893 in St. Petersburg, a few days before his death.

Back in 1891, while in the United States and admiring the "local" attention to him and the enthusiasm of the public, Tchaikovsky noted in his diary "some kind of old man's laxity" and unusual fatigue. Even the local press calls him a man of "about sixty" and he has to justify himself to the public, recalling his real age. The same unusual fatigue is noted by him in the following year.

On the evening of October 20 (November 1), 1893, a perfectly healthy Tchaikovsky visited the elite St. Petersburg restaurant Leiner on the corner of Nevsky Prospekt and the Moika Embankment, where he stayed until about two in the morning. During one of the orders, he demanded to bring him cold water. Despite the unfavorable epidemiological situation in the city due to cholera, Tchaikovsky was served unboiled water, which he drank.

On the morning of October 21 (November 2), 1893, the composer felt unwell and called a doctor, who diagnosed cholera. The illness was severe, and Tchaikovsky died at 3:00 midnight on October 25 (November 6), 1893 from cholera "unexpectedly and untimely" in the apartment of his brother Modest, at 13 on Malaya Morskaya Street. The order of the funeral, with the highest permission of the emperor, was entrusted to the directorate of the Imperial Theaters, which was "a unique and quite exceptional example."

Emperor Alexander III ordered all burial expenses to be covered "from His Majesty's Own sums." The funeral service in the Kazan Cathedral was performed by Bishop Nikandr (Molchanov) of Narva. The choir of singers of the Kazan Cathedral and the choir of the Imperial Russian Opera sang - "the walls of the cathedral could not accommodate everyone who wanted to pray for the repose of the soul of Peter Ilyich." Two members of the imperial family took part in the funeral: Prince Alexander of Oldenburg (trustee of the School of Law) and Grand Duke Konstantin Konstantinovich.

He was buried in the Alexander Nevsky Lavra in the Necropolis of Masters of Arts.

Tchaikovsky - Swan Lake

Tchaikovsky's personal life:

Despite the fact of the (unsuccessful) marriage, Tchaikovsky was a pronounced homosexual (like his brother Modest). The Tchaikovsky family believed that Tchaikovsky experienced his first homosexual experience at the school, at the age of 13, with his classmate, the future poet A. N. Apukhtin (Apukhtin himself was then already in connection with a class teacher).

Tchaikovsky's homosexual ephebophilic inclinations were well known to his contemporaries.

Back in 1862, Tchaikovsky, in the company of lawyer friends, including Apukhtin, got into a homosexual scandal in the St. Petersburg restaurant "Shotan", as a result of which they, in the words of Modest Tchaikovsky, "were denounced throughout the city as mounds of homosexuals."

In a letter to his brother Modest dated August 29, 1878, he notes the corresponding allusion in the feuilleton about the morals of the Conservatory, which appeared in Novoye Vremya, and writes with contrition: “My Bugrian reputation falls on the whole Conservatory, and therefore I am even more ashamed, even harder.”

Subsequently, A. V. Amfiteatrov, who tried to understand this issue by interviewing people close to Tchaikovsky, came to the conclusion that Tchaikovsky was characterized by “spiritual homosexuality, ideal, Platonic ephebism. ... Eternally surrounded by young friends, he always tenderly fiddled with them, becoming attached to them and tying them to himself with love, more passionate than friendly or kindred. One of these Platonic ephebes of Tchaikovsky in Tiflis even shot himself with grief when a composer friend left the city. Under Tchaikovsky we can count many friends-boys and youths, not a single mistress.

Tchaikovsky's letters, primarily to Modest, contain frank confessions. So, in a letter to his brother dated May 4, 1877, he confesses to burning jealousy towards his student, the 22-year-old violinist Joseph (Eduard-Joseph) Kotek, due to the fact that the latter had an affair with the singer Zinaida Eybozhenko. At the same time, in a letter to Modest dated 19.01. 1877 Tchaikovsky, confessing his love for Kotek, at the same time emphasizes that he does not want to go beyond purely platonic relationships.

Tchaikovsky's nephew Vladimir (Bob) Davydov, to whom Tchaikovsky dedicated the Sixth Symphony, whom he made a co-heir and to whom he transferred the right to income deductions for the stage performance of his compositions, is considered to be a strong homosexual attachment of Tchaikovsky's last years.

Tchaikovsky and "Bob" Davydov

In the last years of Tchaikovsky's life, he himself, Modest, Bob, and the young Vladimir Argutinsky-Dolgorukov ("Argo") formed a close circle, which jokingly called itself the "fourth suite." However, Tchaikovsky was not limited to people of his circle: as is clear from the diary, throughout 1886 he was in touch with a cab driver named Ivan.

A number of researchers also consider Tchaikovsky's relationship with his servants, brothers Mikhail and Alexei ("Lenka") Sofronov, to whom he also wrote tender letters, to be homosexual. In the diaries of Tchaikovsky during his stay in Klin, one can find numerous entries of an erotic nature about peasant children, whom he, in the words of Alexander Poznansky, “corrupted with gifts”, however, according to Poznansky, Tchaikovsky’s eroticism in relation to them was platonic, “aesthetically speculative” character and was far from wanting physical possession.

V. S. Sokolov, who studied Tchaikovsky's letters, notes that in the 70s Tchaikovsky suffered from his sexual inclinations and tried to fight them.

N. N. Berberova notes that the “secret” of Tchaikovsky became widely known after 1923, when the composer’s diary of the late 80s was published, translated into European languages, this coincided with the revision of views on homosexuality in European society.

Major works by Tchaikovsky:

Operas by Tchaikovsky:

Governor (1868)
Undine (1869)
Oprichnik (1872)
Eugene Onegin (1878)
Maid of Orleans (1879)
Mazepa (1883)
Cherevichki (1885)
Enchantress (1887)
The Queen of Spades (1890)
Iolanthe (1891)

Ballets by Tchaikovsky:

Swan Lake (1877)
Sleeping Beauty (1889)
The Nutcracker (1892)

Symphonies by Tchaikovsky:

Symphony No. 1 "Winter Dreams" op. 13 (1866)
Symphony No. 2 op.17 (1872)
Symphony No. 3 op. 29 (1875)
Symphony No. 4 op. 36 (1878)
"Manfred" - symphony (1885)
Symphony No. 5 (1888)
Symphony No. 6 op. 74 (1893)

Suites by Tchaikovsky:

Suite No. 1 op. 43 (1879)
Suite No. 2 op. 53 (1883)
Suite No. 3 op. 55 (1884)
Suite No. 4 Mozartian op. 61 (1887)
The Nutcracker, suite for ballet op. 71a (1892)

Separate orchestral works Tchaikovsky:

Solemn overture to the Danish anthem op. 15 (1866)
"The Tempest" op. 18 (1873)
Slavic March (1876) op. 31
"Francesca da Rimini" - symphonic fantasy (1876) op. 32
Italian Capriccio op. 45 (1880)
serenade for string orchestra op. 48 (1880)
"1812" - solemn overture (1880) op. 49
Hamlet, fantasy overture, op. 67, 1888
Thunderstorm, overture to drama op. 76(1864)
"Fatum" - symphonic fantasy op. 77(1868)
"Voevoda" symphonic ballad op. 78 (1891)
"Romeo and Juliet" - Fantasy Overture (1869, 1870, 1880)
March of the Volunteer Fleet (1878)
March of the Yuryevsky regiment (1893)

Concerts of Tchaikovsky:

Concerto No. 1 for piano and orchestra
Piano Concerto No. 1 op. 23 (1875)
Melancholic Serenade op. 26 (1875)
Variations on a Rococo theme for cello and orchestra op. 33 (1878)
Waltz-scherzo for violin and orchestra op. 34 (1877)
Concerto for violin and orchestra op. 35 (1878)
Piano Concerto No. 2 op. 44 (1880)
Concert Fantasia for Piano and Orchestra op. 56 (1884)
Pezzo capriccioso for cello and orchestra op. 62 (1887)
Piano Concerto No. 3 (1893)

Piano works by Tchaikovsky:

Russian scherzo op. 1, no. 1 (1867)
Impromptu op. 1, no. 2 (1867)
Remembrance of Gapsala, 3 pieces op. 2 (1867)
Waltz-Caprice op. 4 (1868)
Romance op. 5 (1868)
Waltz-scherzo op. 7 (1870)
Capriccio op. 8 (1870)
Three Pieces op. 9 (1870)
Two pieces op. 10 (1871)
Six Pieces op. 19 (1873)
Six plays on one theme op. 21 (1873)
Grand Sonata in G major op. 37a (1878)
Seasons op. 37b (1876)
Children's album op. 39 (1878)
Twelve Pieces op. 40 (1878)
Six Pieces op. 51 (1882)
Dumka op. 59 (1886)
Eighteen Pieces op. 72 (1893)
Sonata in C sharp minor op. 80 posth (1865, ed. 1900)

Chamber music by Tchaikovsky:

String Quartet No. 1 op. 11 (1871)
String Quartet No. 2 op. 22 (1874)
String Quartet No. 3 op. 30 (1876)
"Memories of a Dear Place", three pieces for violin and piano op. 42 (1878)
Piano trio op. 50 (1882)
"Memories of Florence", string sextet op. 70 (1890)

Choral music Tchaikovsky:

Vespers for mixed choir unaccompanied, op. 52
Liturgy for unaccompanied mixed choir, op. 41
Spiritual and musical compositions for full choir (1884-85): Cherubic Hymn No. 1 (1887)

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840 in the village of Votkinsk, located on the territory of modern Udmurtia. His father was Ilya Petrovich Tchaikovsky, an engineer descended from the Cossack Chaek family, known in Ukraine. The mother of the future famous composer was Alexandra Andreevna Assier, who was trained at the School for Women's Orphans shortly before her father's death. Alexandra Andreevna was trained in literature, geography, arithmetic, rhetoric and foreign languages.

The family ended up in the Urals due to the fact that Ilya Petrovich was offered the position of head of the Kamsko-Votkinsky steel plant, which at that time was a very large enterprise. In Votkinsk, Tchaikovsky Sr. received a large house with servants and even his own army, consisting of a hundred Cossacks. Nobles, young people from the capital, English engineers and other venerable personalities often looked into this house.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky in his youth

In his family, Peter was the second child. He also had an older brother, Nikolai, a younger brother, Ippolit, and a younger sister, Alexandra. In the big house of the Tchaikovskys lived not only the couple themselves with their children, but also numerous relatives of Ilya Petrovich. A French governess, Fanny Dyurbach, was called from St. Petersburg to teach the children, who later became practically a member of the Tchaikovsky family.

Music has always been a welcome guest in the parental home of Peter Ilyich. His father knew how to play the flute, his mother - the piano and harp, and she also very skillfully performed romances. The governess was deprived of musical education, but she also had a passion for music. There was an orchestrion (mechanical organ) and a piano in the Tchaikovskys' house. The young musician took piano lessons from the serf Marya Palchikova, who was literate in music.

Another hobby of the young Tchaikovsky, in addition to learning the basics of playing the piano, was poetry. Peter wrote with rapture French numerous verses. In addition, he tried to learn everything that was possible from the biography of Louis XVII. reverence for this historical figure he carried through his whole life.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky in his youth

In 1848 the Tchaikovskys moved to Moscow as Ilya Petrovich had retired and intended to find a private service. Just a couple of months later, the family moved again, this time to St. Petersburg. There, the eldest sons were assigned to the Schmelling boarding school.

In St. Petersburg, Pyotr Ilyich continued to study music, and also became more familiar with ballet, opera and a symphony orchestra. There, the young man contracted measles, which subsequently caused him to periodically have seizures.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky with his family

In 1849, Nikolai Tchaikovsky, Peter's older brother, was assigned to the Institute of the Corps of Mining Engineers, and the rest of the children, together with their parents, returned to the Urals, to the city of Alapaevsk. There, the head of the family took the post of head of the plant of the heirs of Yakovlev. Fanny Dyurbach had left the Tchaikovsky family by that time, and in order to prepare the grown-up Pyotr Ilyich to receive further education another governess was hired - Anastasia Petrova.

In the same year, the young musician got two more younger brother: twins Modest and Anatoly.

Education and civil service

Although the young Pyotr Tchaikovsky had shown an increased interest in music for several years, was delighted with famous operas and loved going to ballet, his parents did not at all consider music as a worthy profession for their son. At first, they wanted to send him to the Institute of the Corps of Mining Engineers, like the eldest son Nikolai, but then they gave preference to the Imperial School of Law, located in St. Petersburg. Pyotr Ilyich entered it in 1850.

The musician studied at the school until 1859. The first years of study were the most difficult for Tchaikovsky: he had a hard time parting with his relatives, who could not often visit him. And the guardianship of Modest Vakar, a family friend, was overshadowed by the fact that ten-year-old Tchaikovsky accidentally brought scarlet fever into his house, because of which Modest's little son died suddenly.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky

In 1852, when Ilya Petrovich left the service, the whole family moved to St. Petersburg. During these years, Pyotr Ilyich actively got acquainted with Russian opera and ballet, and also became friends with a classmate, the poet Alexei Apukhtin, who had a great influence on his views and beliefs.

In 1854, Tchaikovsky's mother died after a long battle with cholera. Ilya Petrovich distributed older children to educational institutions closed type, and with four-year-old twins temporarily settled with his brother.

Portrait of Pyotr Tchaikovsky

In the period from 1855 to 1858, Peter Ilyich took piano lessons from the famous German pianist Rudolf Kündinger. His young Tchaikovsky was hired by his father, but in the spring of 1858 the lessons had to be stopped: due to an unsuccessful scam, Ilya Petrovich lost almost all his money, and to pay foreign musician became nothing. Fortunately, soon Tchaikovsky Sr. was offered to head the leadership of the Technological Institute and was offered a large state-owned apartment, where he moved with his children.

Pyotr Ilyich completed his studies at the School of Law in 1859. It is interesting that he enjoyed great sympathy both from the teachers and from other pupils of the school. Unlike many other talented creative figures, who were distinguished by their unsociableness and poor socialization, Pyotr Tchaikovsky felt comfortable in society and fit perfectly into any company.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky

Upon completion of his studies, the young man got a job at the Ministry of Justice. There he was engaged, most often, in the conduct of various affairs of the peasants. In his free time, he continued to go to the opera house and study music. In 1861, Pyotr Ilyich traveled abroad for the first time, visiting Hamburg, Berlin, Antwerp, Brussels, Paris, Ostend and even London. By that time, he was fluent in Italian and French, and therefore was able to accompany the engineer Pisarev V.V. (a friend of his father) as an interpreter.

Creation

Surprisingly, even at the age of 21, Pyotr Ilyich, who had received an education and entered the public service, had not yet really thought about a musical career. He, like his parents once, did not take his hobby seriously. But, fortunately, the father of the future composer Ilya Petrovich still felt that his son was destined to become a great musician.

Tchaikovsky Sr. even went to Rudolf Kündinger to get his opinion on his son's talent. The German pianist categorically stated that Tchaikovsky Jr. had no special musical abilities, and 21 years old is not the right age to start a creative career. And Pyotr Ilyich himself suggested that his father combine work with getting music education At first I took it as a joke.

But when he learned that a new conservatory was opening in St. Petersburg, headed by the famous Anton Rubinstein, everything changed radically. Tchaikovsky decided at all costs to enter the St. Petersburg Conservatory, which he did, becoming one of the first students of this educational institution composition class. And soon after that, he completely abandoned law, deciding, despite the problems with money that appeared, to devote himself entirely to music.

As his diploma work, Pyotr Ilyich wrote the cantata "To Joy". It was created for the Russian translation of Friedrich Schiller's ode with the same name. The cantata made a bad impression on the musicians of St. Petersburg. The critic Caesar Cui was especially harsh, saying that as a composer Tchaikovsky was extremely weak, and also accusing him of conservatism. And this despite the fact that for Pyotr Ilyich music was freedom, and his idols were Borodin, Mussorgsky, Balakirev - composers who did not recognize authorities and rules.

Portrait of Pyotr Tchaikovsky

But such a reaction did not at all embarrass the young composer. Having received his well-deserved silver medal on the successful completion of the St. Petersburg Conservatory, which was then the highest award, he set to work with even greater zeal and passion. In 1866, the composer moved to Moscow at the invitation of his mentor's brother. Nikolai Rubinstein offered him a professorship at the Moscow Conservatory.

Career heyday

At the Moscow Conservatory, Tchaikovsky proved to be an excellent teacher. In addition, he put a lot of effort into high-quality organization educational process. Since there were few worthy textbooks for his students at that time, the composer took up translations foreign literature and even creating their own methodological materials.

However, in 1878, Pyotr Ilyich, tired of being torn between teaching and his own work, left his post. His place was taken by Sergei Taneyev, who became Tchaikovsky's most beloved student. A wealthy patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, helped Tchaikovsky make ends meet. Being a wealthy widow, she idolized the composer and provided him with subsidies of 6,000 rubles annually.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky

It was after moving to Moscow that the real rise began creative career Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and there was a significant growth of him as a composer. At this time, he met with the composers participating in the creative community "Mighty Handful". On the advice of Mily Balakirev, head of the Commonwealth, in 1869 Tchaikovsky created a fantasy overture based on Romeo and Juliet.

In 1873, Pyotr Ilyich wrote another of his famous works - the symphonic fantasy "The Tempest", the idea for which was suggested to him by Vladimir Stasov, an authoritative music critic at that time. Around the same time, Tchaikovsky began to travel again, gaining inspiration abroad and using the images imprinted in his memory to form the basis of his subsequent creations.

In the 1870s, the composer wrote such works as the ballet "Swan Lake", the opera "Oprichnik", the Piano Concerto, the Second and Third Symphonies, the fantasy "Francesca da Rimini", the opera "Eugene Onegin", piano cycle"Seasons" and many others. In the 1880s and 1890s, Pyotr Tchaikovsky traveled abroad even more often than before, and in the overwhelming majority of cases - as part of concert trips.

During such trips, the musician met and became friends with many musicians from Western Europe: Gustav Mahler, Arthur Nikish, Edvard Grieg, Antonin Dvorak and others. The composer himself acted as a conductor during concerts. In the early 1890s, Tchaikovsky even managed to visit the United States. There, a stunning success awaited him during a concert where Pyotr Ilyich conducted his own works. Written at the time of creative maturity, no one doubted the composer's talent.

The last years before his death, Tchaikovsky spent in the vicinity of the town of Klin near Moscow. In the same place, he agreed to open a school, dissatisfied with the quality of life of local peasants, and donated money for its maintenance. In 1885, he helped the Klinovites fight a fire that burned down several dozen houses in the city.

During this period of his life, the composer wrote the ballet The Nutcracker, the opera The Queen of Spades, the overture Hamlet, the opera Iolanta, and the Fifth Symphony. At the same time, the international recognition of Pyotr Ilyich's talent was confirmed: in 1892 he was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Fine Arts in Paris, and in 1893 an honorary doctorate from the University of Cambridge.

Tchaikovsky died on November 6, 1893 from cholera. He was buried in the Kazan Cathedral, and buried in the Necropolis of Masters of Arts.

Personal life

Many photos have been preserved where Pyotr Tchaikovsky is captured in a more than decent form with his male friends. The orientation of the composer during his lifetime became the subject of gossip: some accused the musician of being a homosexual. It was assumed that his men (the men to whom he had a platonic affection) are Iosif Kotek, Vladimir Davydov, and even the brothers Alexei and Mikhail Safronov.

Pyotr Tchaikovsky with Iosif Kotek (left) and Vladimir Davydov (right)

It is difficult to judge whether there is authentic evidence that the composer loved men. His connections with the individuals mentioned above could well have been just friendly. Be that as it may, there were also women in Tchaikovsky's life, although some researchers claim that this is how the composer tried to hide that he was gay.

So, the failed wife of Pyotr Ilyich was the young French prima donna Arto Desiree, who preferred the Spaniard Marian Padilla to him. And in 1877, Antonina Milyukova, who was eight years younger than her newly-made husband, became his official wife. However, this marriage lasted only a few weeks, although officially Antonina and Peter never divorced.

It is worth recalling his connection with Nadezhda von Meck, who bowed to the composer's talent and supported him financially for many years.