Russia trained Tchaikovsky for bureaucracy, not music
Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) became the first Russian composer with a lasting global concert life. As a boy he was steered toward civil service because the empire lacked music schools. Personal crises shadowed ballets and symphonies that crowds loved before some critics did.
Tchaikovsky was born in 1840 in Votkinsk, near the Kama River, where his father, a mining engineer and lieutenant colonel, ran the ironworks. A French governess, Fanny Dürbach, arrived when he was four and a half, and by six he spoke French and German. Piano lessons began at five, and within three years he read music as well as his teacher. His parents even bought an orchestrion, a barrel organ that mimicked orchestral effects.
Russia then had no system of musical training, so in 1850 the family sent the ten-year-old to board at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence, beginning with two years in its preparatory school some 1,300 kilometres from home. The separation hurt him for life, and his mother's death from cholera in 1854, when he was 14, deepened the wound; his first serious composition was a waltz in her memory. A piano teacher, Rudolph Kündinger, told his father in 1855 that he saw no future composer in the boy, partly to spare him the hardships Kündinger had suffered as a Russian musician.
He graduated in June 1859 as a titular counsellor and spent three years at the Ministry of Justice. That same year Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna and Anton Rubinstein founded the Russian Musical Society to nurture home-grown talent rather than import Europeans, and its new Saint Petersburg Conservatory gave Tchaikovsky his chance. He graduated in 1865 with a thoroughly Western training that separated him from the nationalist composers around him. Rubinstein called him a genius yet disliked his bolder student work. Nikolai Rubinstein then hired him to teach theory at the new Moscow Conservatory for 50 rubles a month, and Johann Strauss II conducted his Characteristic Dances in public.
The 1812 Overture, the First Piano Concerto, Eugene Onegin and his ballets made him the first Russian composer with lasting international appeal. Critics were slower: some Russians found him too Western, while some Europeans praised him for going beyond exotic cliché. Depression shadowed him, fed by a failed marriage to Antonina Miliukova, the death of Nikolai Rubinstein and the end of his 13-year bond with his patron Nadezhda von Meck.
Source: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
