TCHAIKOVSKY, PETER ILYICH

(1840–1893), Russian composer.

Arguably the most famous Russian composer, Tchaikovsky was the first to achieve renown beyond Russia's borders and establish a place for Russian music in the repertories of Western concert halls and musical theaters. The first professional Russian composer to receive a thorough musical education, the import of Tchaikovsky's achievement owes much to his mastery of the dominant nineteenth-century musical genre: the symphony. Yet Tchaikovsky's enormous range, versatility, and output—he composed in all the major genres, including symphonies, operas, ballets, chamber works, songs, as well as compositions for solo instruments—assure the composer's place among the most popular and prolific European composers of his day.

Tchaikovsky's virtual dominance of the Russian musical scene by the end of his life aroused the envy of the nationalist composers known as the Mighty Handful, yet Tchaikovsky's ability to adapt native folk material to established Western compositional structures proved more successful than their more earnest attempts to craft from those materials a unique native musical language. Four Tchaikovsky masterworks, representing three genres in which Tchaikovsky particularly excelled, were the fruits of an unprecedented final creative flourish: the opera Queen of Spades (1891), the ballets Sleeping Beauty (1889), The Nutcracker (1892), and the Sixth Symphony (1893).

Although Tchaikovsky's music was deemed bourgeois in the relatively radical period following the 1917 Revolution, these criticisms faded in the Josef Stalin era, when the monumental art of the previous century once again found favor, and Tchaikovsky was hailed as a symphonist par excellence—the composer's homosexuality, the perceived melancholy of his music, and his conservative politics notwithstanding. Tchaikovsky died of cholera in St. Petersburg in 1893, though a very active party of mostly Russian researchers allege the composer's death was the result of a suicide brought about by a crisis over his homosexuality.

See also: music

bibliography

Brown, David. (1978–1992). Tchaikovsky: A Biographical and Critical Study. London: Gollancz.

Orlova, A., ed. (1990). Tchaikovsky: A Self-Portrait. New York: Oxford University Press.

Poznansky, Alexander. (1991). Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man. New York: Simon and Schuster Macmillan.

Poznansky, Alexander, and Brett Langston. (2002). The Tchaikovsky Handbook: A Guide to the Man and His Music, comp. Alexander Poznansky and Brett Langston. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.

Taruskin, Richard. (1997). Defining Russia Musically: Historical and Hermeneutical Essays. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Tim Scholl