Biography of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky | Russian compose.

(Piotr Ilich Tchaikovsky or Tchaikovsky;) Votkinsk, Russia, 1840 - Petersburgo, 1893) Russian composer. Despite being contemporary of the Group of five, consisting of figures of the stature of Borodin, Mussorgsky and Rimsky-Korsakov, Tchaikovsky style not can being enclosed within the margins of the then prevailing nationalism in his native Russia. Character in regards to influences (among them and in a prominent place of the German, although not without elements of Russian symphonic), their music is primarily deeply expressive and personal, revelatory of the personality of the author, complex and tormented.

Tchaikovsky

Early theoretical studies and early musical experiences, including opera Don Juan by Mozart, who left an indelible mark in the mind of the boy go back to his tranquil childhood years. Since then was always devoted to the study of art, although, at the wish of his father, he enrolled in the Faculty of law of Petersburgo, and achieved the title of laws, accepted a position at the Ministry of Justice, which, however, did not remain long: in 1863 resigned from employment to be able to attend the course of composition that Anton Rubinstein taught at the Conservatory of St. Petersburg. Graduated in 1865, he was appointed the following year to teach harmony at the Moscow Conservatory, where he developed his activity until 1877.

The first steps of Tchaikovsky in the music world revealed a special talent for the creation or interpretation. His early works, such as the symphonic poem Fatum or Symphony No. 1 "winter dreams", showed a little defined personality. Easy inspiration, she liked the warm and spontaneous, lyrical open to idyllic or elegiac inflections of a pleasant cantabilidad, which explains the subsequent success of his works both in their homeland and abroad.

At the end of this period dates back the first of his compositions which enjoyed acceptance, the Romeo and Juliet Overture (1869). In an unusual expression, this "fantasy Overture" shuns all picturesqueness to focus on the tragic fate of the main couple. The score had a long gestation: because of the critical judgements of Milij Balakirev, Tchaikovsky came to write three versions of the same, the most played of which is the third, dated in 1880.

Tchaikovsky at age 25 (Petersburgo, 1865)

Only after the composition, already in the 1870's, scores as the Symphony No. 2 "small Russia" and, above all, the famous Concerto for piano and Orchestra No. 1 (are piece premiered in 1875 with absolutely unforgettable moments, as its known and brilliant introduction), the music of Tchaikovsky began to acquire a characteristic, and own tone occasionally gimmicky and increasingly given to melancholy. In July 1877, married a young girl that broke a few months after the wedding. The concerns and disappointments of this sad episode upset her interior life, also causing damage to your health; attacked from a severe nervous depression, then left Russia for withdrawing in a small village near Lake Geneva.

The maturity

Thanks to the economic support of a rich widow, Nadejda von Meck (protective also Debussy and paradoxically, would never come to that, to know), Tchaikovsky could devote, since the end of the Decade of 1870, all his time to composition. Fruit of the dedication were some of his most beautiful and original works include Concerto for violin and Orchestra (1877), the ballet Swan Lake (1877), the opera Evgeny Onegin (1878), the 1812 Overture (1880) and Italian caprice (1880).

All of them, the best known is his first great ballet, Swan Lake (1877). Despite the lack of success of his debut, the romantic and magical story of love between Siegfried and Odette, transformed into a swan princess, is currently one of the leading pieces of the Repertoire, with numbers so famous as the Waltz of the first Act, the Introduction of the second or the third features dances.

No less important is the Concerto for violin and Orchestra (1877), built in three movements according to the scheme of the great classical models. The second movement is an andante in less entitled "Canzonetta", and stands out as one of the most famous of Tchaikovsky and most often interpreted by its remarkable ease of execution. The "Canzonetta" is certainly one of the most beautiful pages of Tchaikovsky; female and languid melancholy, one of the most characteristic features and constant in his art, not listed in its usual form (expressive elegance and amusingly sentimental accent), but adjusted to a reason saturated with intimate delicacy and pure poetry, something that rarely is in Tchaikovsky.

Tchaikovsky in the year of his death
(Kharkov, March, 1893)

In 1885, already resettled, he returned to Russia, and two years later began a vast tour concerts in Europe and America. The last phase of his creative activity belong the opera the Queen of Spades (1890), the two ballets the sleeping beauty (1890) and Nutcracker (1892) and the last of his six symphonies, true musical testament: Symphony No. 6 «Pathétique».

Premiered on January 15, 1890 in Petersburgo, the sleeping beauty is the second of its large ballets and was one of the first examples of the genre composed according to join making music and the choreography: Tchaikovsky composed the score according to the indications of the French choreographer Marius Petipa. The work was thus born as a unit, in which music is admirably adapted to the dramatic action. Include the waltz of the first act and the dances of the third, these featuring different characters from the tales of fairy.

Two years later he also created Petersburgo in two acts Nutcrackerballet, whose story, based on a story by E. T. A. Hoffmann, dispensed with the dark and psychological of the original slope into a magical tale of Christmas. While it was the ballet less appreciated by the composer himself, is one of which more fame has reached, thanks mostly to the divertissement which marks its climax: six dances features (Trepak, Arabic dance, Chinese dance, Spanish...) and the Waltz of the flowers.

Few days before his death, Tchaikovsky conducted in Moscow its Symphony No. 6 (1893), better known under the name of pathetic, especially revelatory work of the complex personality of the musician and the intimate drama that surrounded his life, tormented by a repressed homosexuality and a constant and morbid, depressive state. Of large proportions, but uneven, this score reflects, perhaps better than others, the peculiar characteristics of the style of Tchaikovsky and the fickleness of his fantasy, tending to desperdigar own issues rather than uniting them in a single constructive vision. The same year of its release, 1893, was declared a cholera epidemic; infected the composer, the disease put an end to its existence.

Since then has wanted to interpret the Symphony No. 6 «Pathétique» (and especially the last time, that, contrary to the usual Symphony, a movement is slow: "Adagio lamentoso") as the expression of a sad feeling that Tchaikovsky had to have its next weekend. Certainly, in the "Adagio lamentoso" returns to fall upon the Orchestra the grim and painful atmosphere that had opened the Symphony and that had been as forgotten in the parentheses of the two "Allegros" serene and unwrapped, just rozados here and there by a gentle melancholy accents; the final movement, on the other hand, expresses all the pain and the bitterness of a musician greatly sensitive and tragically split.

Extracted from the website: Biografías y Vidas