He trained to be a civil servant and became a musician: Who is Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky?

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840, in Votkinsk, a small mining town in present-day Udmurtia, then in the Vyatka province of the Russian Empire.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, who lived in the 19th century, was a Romantic Period Russian classical music composer. He composed works in many genres, including symphonies, operas, ballets, instrumental and chamber music, and songs. He wrote the most popular concert and show music in today's classical music repertoire. These include the ballet music of Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, The Nutcracker, the 1812 Overture, the first Piano Concerto, the last three symphonies, and the opera music of Yevgeni Onegin.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893) was a Russian composer of the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music would make a lasting impression internationally. Tchaikovsky wrote some of the most popular concert and theatrical music in the current classical repertoire, including the ballets Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, the 1812 Overture, his First Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto, the Romeo and Juliet Overture-Fantasy, several symphonies, and the opera Eugene Onegin.

Tchaikovsky was born into a middle-class family. Although he showed an aptitude for music from an early age, he received training to become a civil servant. Despite his family's wishes, he chose to pursue a music career and entered the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1862 and graduated from there in 1865. This formal, western-oriented education separated Tchaikovsky from the nationalist movement of his time, known as the Russian Five, consisting of young Russian composers.

Although he achieved significant success, he never felt emotionally safe faced personal crises throughout his life, and fell into depression from time to time. Factors for this include his repressed homosexuality and his fear of being exposed, his bad marital life, and the end of his 13-year correspondence with Nadezhda von Meck, a rich widow whose face he never saw and from whom he received only financial support. Despite the turmoil in his private life, his fame increased day by day, he was given a lifetime pension by the Tsar, and his works were appreciated in concert halls around the world. Although it was said that the cholera epidemic caused his sudden death at the age of 53, some sources claimed that it was suicide.

Although very popular among concert audiences around the world, Tchaikovsky has occasionally been subjected to harsh criticism from critics, musicians, and composers. However, today there is no longer any doubt that he is an important composer. At the beginning and mid-20th century, western critics found Tchaikovsky's music vulgar and claimed that there was no thought behind it. However, this disdain disappeared over time.

Tchaikovsky achieved great success with his Piano Concerto No. 1, performed for the first time in 1875, and his ballet Swan Lake, performed in 1876; He completed his most successful opera, Eugene Onegin, in 1879; In 1880 he wrote the Overture for the Year 1812; The Violin Concerto, which was first performed in 1881, became one of the most popular works in the violin repertoire over time.

The 5th Symphony was a great success since its first performance in 1888; The Sleeping Beauty ballet was staged in 1889; The Queen of Spades, which he wrote in 1890, was staged at the Tsarist Opera House that year. While he was at the peak of his art, Nadezhda von Meck stopped supporting him financially and corresponding with him. However, Tchaikovsky continued his composition work and went on a tour in Russia in 1892. He bought a house near Moscow, where he composed the 6th Symphony (Pathetic) and started writing the Nutcracker ballet. He died in Petersburg in 1893 after falling into bed after drinking a glass of unboiled water during the cholera epidemic.

Tchaikovsky composed 7 symphonies, 2 operas, three ballets, four concertos, three for piano and one for violin, three string quartets, and various chamber music works, the most famous of which is the Andante Cantabile (the heavy movement of the 1st string quartet).