Russian composer born in 1840

InTchaikovsky honored his parents' wishes by taking up a bureau clerk post with the Ministry of Justice — a post he would hold for four years, during which time he became increasingly fascinated with music. When he was 21, Tchaikovsky decided to take music lessons at the Russian Musical Society. A few months later, he enrolled at the newly founded St.

Petersburg Conservatory, becoming one of the school's first composition students. In addition to learning while at the conservatory, Tchaikovsky gave private lessons to other students. Inhe moved to Moscow, where he became a professor of harmony at the Moscow Conservatory. Pyotr Tchaikovsky's work was first publicly performed inwith Johann Strauss the Younger conducting Tchaikovsky's Characteristic Dances at a Pavlovsk concert.

InTchaikovsky's First Symphony was well-received when it was publicly performed in Moscow. The following year, his first opera, The Voyevoda, made its way to the stage — with little fanfare. After scrapping The VoyevodaTchaikovsky repurposed some of its material to compose his next opera, Oprichnikwhich achieved some acclaim when it was performed at the Maryinsky in St.

Petersburg in By this time, Tchaikovsky had also earned praise for his Second Symphony. Also inhis opera, Vakula the Smithreceived harsh critical reviews, yet Tchaikovsky still managed to establish himself as a talented composer of instrumental pieces with his Piano Concerto No. Acclaim came readily for Tchaikovsky inwith his composition Symphony No.

At the end of that year, the composer embarked on a tour of Europe. C [ edit ]. D [ edit ]. E [ edit ]. F [ edit ]. G [ edit ]. H [ edit ]. I [ edit ]. J [ edit ]. K [ edit ].

Russian composer born in 1840: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (/tʃaɪˈkɒfski/ chy-KOF-skee;

L [ edit ]. Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was a Russian composer whose works included symphonies, concertos, operas, ballets, and chamber music. He displayed exceptional musical ability from an early age, improvising at the piano and composing his first song inaged four. Tchaikovsky persuaded his father that music was his future and he began composition lessons with Anton Rubinstein in Following his ill-fated, short-lived marriage inhe made a failed attempt at committing suicide.

Byhe was conducting his own music to great acclaim and producing such works as the Sixth Symphony, the 'Pathetique' in the year of his death and the ballets The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker His death in in St. This active engagement with the music "opened for the listener a vista of emotional and psychological tension and an extremity of feeling that possessed relevance because it seemed reminiscent of one's own 'truly lived and felt experience' or one's search for intensity in a deeply personal sense".

As mentioned above, russian composer born in 1840 was a natural part of Tchaikovsky's music, just as it is an integral part of Russian music. By making subtle but noticeable changes in the rhythm or phrasing of a tune, modulating to another key, changing the melody itself or varying the instruments playing it, Tchaikovsky could keep a listener's interest from flagging.

By extending the number of repetitions, he could increase the musical and dramatic tension of a passage, building "into an emotional experience of almost unbearable intensity", as Brown phrases it, controlling when the peak and release of that tension would take place. Like other late Romantic composers, Tchaikovsky relied heavily on orchestration for musical effects.

Rimsky-Korsakov regularly referred his students at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory to it and called it "devoid of all striving after effect, [to] give a healthy, beautiful sonority". Tchaikovsky's expert use of having two or more instruments play a melody simultaneously a practice called doubling and his ear for uncanny combinations of instruments resulted in "a generalized orchestral sonority in which the individual timbres of the instruments, being thoroughly mixed, would vanish".

In works like the "Serenade for Strings" and the Variations on a Rococo ThemeTchaikovsky showed he was highly gifted at writing in a style of 18th-century European pastiche. Tchaikovsky graduated from imitation to full-scale evocation in the ballet The Sleeping Beauty and the opera The Queen of Spades. His Rococo pastiches also may have offered escape into a musical world purer than his own, into which he felt himself irresistibly drawn.

In this sense, Tchaikovsky operated in the opposite manner to Igor Stravinskywho turned to Neoclassicism partly as a form of compositional self-discovery. Tchaikovsky's attraction to ballet might have allowed a similar refuge into a fairy-tale world, where he could freely write dance music within a tradition of French elegance. Maes maintains that, regardless of what he was writing, Tchaikovsky's main concern was how his music affected his listeners on an aesthetic level, at specific moments in the piece, and on a cumulative level once the music had finished.

What his listeners experienced on an emotional or visceral level became an end in itself. Considering that he lived and worked in what was probably the last 19th-century feudal nation, the statement is not actually that surprising. And yet, even when writing so-called 'programme' music, for example, his Romeo and Juliet fantasy overture, he cast it in sonata form.

His use of stylized 18th-century melodies and patriotic themes was geared toward the values of Russian aristocracy. Using it in the finale of a work could assure its success with Russian listeners. Tchaikovsky's relationship with collaborators was mixed. Like Nikolai Rubinstein with the First Piano Concerto, virtuoso and pedagogue Leopold Auer rejected the Violin Concerto initially but changed his mind; he played it to great public success and taught it to his students, who included Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein.

Tchaikovsky was angered by Fitzenhagen's license but did nothing; the Rococo Variations were published with the cellist's amendments.

Russian composer born in 1840: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (born April

His collaboration on the three ballets went better and in Marius Petipawho worked with him on the last two, he might have found an advocate. Tchaikovsky compromised to make his music as practical as possible for the dancers and was accorded more creative freedom than ballet composers were usually accorded at the time. He responded with scores that minimized the rhythmic subtleties normally present in his work but were inventive and rich in melody, with more refined and imaginative orchestration than in the average ballet score.

Critical reception to Tchaikovsky's music was varied but also improved over time. Even aftersome inside Russia held it suspect for not being nationalistic enough and thought Western European critics lauded it for exactly that reason. Pandemonium, delirium tremensraving, and above all, noise worse confounded! The division between Russian and Western critics remained through much of the 20th century but for a different reason.

According to Brown and Wiley, the prevailing view of Western critics was that the same qualities in Tchaikovsky's music that appealed to audiences—its strong emotions, directness and eloquence and colorful orchestration—added up to compositional shallowness. Conservative critics, he adds, may have felt threatened by the "violence and 'hysteria ' " they detected and felt such emotive displays "attacked the boundaries of conventional aesthetic appreciation—the cultured reception of art as an act of formalist discernment—and the polite engagement of art as an act of amusement".

There has also been the fact that the composer did not follow sonata form strictly, relying instead on juxtaposing blocks of tonalities and thematic groups. Maes states this point has been seen at times as a weakness rather than a sign of originality. In a article, New York Times critic Allan Kozinn writes, "It is Tchaikovsky's flexibility, after all, that has given us a sense of his variability Tchaikovsky was capable of turning out music—entertaining and widely beloved though it is—that seems superficial, manipulative and trivial when regarded in the context of the whole literature.

The First Piano Concerto is a case in point. It makes a joyful noise, it swims in pretty tunes and its dramatic rhetoric allows or even requires a soloist to make a grand, swashbuckling impression. But it is entirely hollow". In the 21st century, however, critics are reacting more positively to Tchaikovsky's tunefulness, originality, and craftsmanship.

Horowitz maintains that, while the standing of Tchaikovsky's music has fluctuated among critics, for the public, "it never went out of style, and his most popular works have yielded iconic sound-bytes [ sic ], such as the love theme from Romeo and Juliet ". According to Wiley, Tchaikovsky was a pioneer in several ways. This, Wiley adds, allowed him the time and freedom to consolidate the Western compositional practices he had learned at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory with Russian folk song and other native musical elements to fulfill his own expressive goals and forge an original, deeply personal style.

Russian composer born in 1840: Russian composer.

He made an impact in not only complete works such as the symphony but also program music and, as Wiley phrases it, "transformed Liszt's and Berlioz's achievements They point out that only Glinka had preceded him in combining Russian and Western practices and his teachers in Saint Petersburg had been thoroughly Germanic in their musical outlook. He was, they write, for all intents and purposes alone in his artistic quest.

Maes and Taruskin write that Tchaikovsky believed that his professionalism in combining skill and high standards in his musical works separated him from his contemporaries in The Five. Like his country, Maes writes, it took him time to discover how to express his Russianness in a way that was true to himself and what he had learned. Because of his professionalism, Maes says, he worked hard at this goal and succeeded.

The composer's friend, music critic Herman Larochewrote of The Sleeping Beauty that the score contained "an element deeper and more general than color, in the internal structure of the music, above all in the foundation of the element of melody. This basic element is undoubtedly Russian". Tchaikovsky was inspired to reach beyond Russia with his music, according to Maes and Taruskin.

Between these two very different worlds, Tchaikovsky's music became the sole bridge". According to musicologist Leonid SabaneyevTchaikovsky was not comfortable with being recorded for posterity and tried to shy away from it. On an apparently separate visit from the one related above, Block asked the composer to play something on a piano or at least say something.

Tchaikovsky refused. He told Block, "I am a bad pianist and my voice is raspy. Why should one eternalize it? Contents move to sidebar hide. Article Talk. Read Edit View history. Tools Tools. Download as PDF Printable version. In other projects.

Russian composer born in 1840: Ekaterina Likoshin (–); Alexander Alyabyev (–);

Wikimedia Commons Wikiquote Wikisource Wikidata item. Russian composer — For other uses, see Tchaikovsky disambiguation. Tchaikovsky, c. VotkinskRussian Empire. Saint PetersburgRussian Empire. Early life and education [ edit ]. Tchaikovsky's birthplace in in VotkinskRussia, now a museum. The Tchaikovsky family in Career [ edit ]. Relationship with The Five [ edit ].

Opera composer [ edit ]. Piano Concerto No. Return to Russia [ edit ]. Belyayev circle and growing reputation [ edit ]. See also: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and the Belyayev circle. Personal life [ edit ]. Left to right Tchaikovsky and Antonina on their honeymoon in ; Iosif Kotek left and Tchaikovsky right in Death [ edit ]. Music [ edit ].

Main article: Music of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Antecedents and influences [ edit ]. Creative range [ edit ]. Compositional style [ edit ]. Valse in F-sharp minor. From Twelve Pieces for pianoOp.