Piotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, in the Ural region of the Russian Empire, in May 1840, the son of a mining engineer. He was educated at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in Saint Petersburg from the age of ten, and worked as a civil servant in the Ministry of Justice after graduating. He resigned in 1862 to enrol at the newly-founded Saint Petersburg Conservatory under Anton Rubinstein, and graduated in 1865 — the same year as the first publication of any of his works.

His mature career was divided between Moscow, where he taught at the Moscow Conservatory from 1866 to 1878, and the years afterwards as an independent composer supported by Nadezhda von Meck — the wealthy patron who funded him for thirteen years on condition that they never meet. Six symphonies (the Fifth and Sixth among the most performed in the orchestral repertoire), the *Pathétique*, the Piano Concerto No. 1, the Violin Concerto, three ballets (*Swan Lake*, *Sleeping Beauty*, *The Nutcracker*), ten operas (*Eugene Onegin*, *The Queen of Spades*, *Mazeppa*), and a substantial body of chamber music and song. He toured as a conductor in Europe and the United States, including conducting the opening concert at Carnegie Hall in 1891.

Tchaikovsky died in Saint Petersburg in November 1893, nine days after conducting the premiere of the Sixth Symphony. The circumstances — officially cholera, but contested by historians since — remain debated. Music Preserved’s archive includes a substantial range of his orchestral, operatic and chamber work.