60 Fun Facts About Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

In which town in the Russian Empire was Tchaikovsky born in 1840?

Votkinsk, where his father managed the ironworks, was his home for only eight years: his father retired in 1848 and the family left that autumn.

To which musical period does Tchaikovsky belong?

The Romantic era prized personal feeling, and Tchaikovsky's tuneful, open-hearted melodies were written to stir it, which is why his music remains among the most popular of any composer's.

Family legend says Tchaikovsky's Cossack great-grandfather Fyodor Chaika fought at which decisive battle of 1709?

Poltava is where family tradition placed the Cossack Fyodor Chaika; the family later lengthened Chaika, the Slavic word for gull, into Tchaikovsky.

In his fifties Tchaikovsky travelled to France to visit Fanny Dürbach, who had been what to him?

His governess from 1844 to 1848, Fanny Dürbach kept his childhood exercise books and letters for decades, and her memories supplied many of the stories told about his early years.

Tchaikovsky began piano lessons at five and soon knew which composer's music?

Chopin's mazurkas came his way in those first years at the piano; a year before the lessons began, aged four, he had made his first recorded attempt at composing, a song written with his little sister.

Which self-playing instrument first brought Bellini and Donizetti to the young Tchaikovsky?

An orchestrion is a barrel organ built to imitate an orchestra; his supportive parents bought it and hired a tutor, yet at ten they sent him away to boarding school in the capital.

Seeing no future in music, Tchaikovsky's parents sent him to boarding school at ten to train for which career?

Civil servant was the safe choice: Russia then had no conservatories, so he spent nine years at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence and became a government clerk at 19.

Which nickname belongs to Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, which he premiered just nine days before his death?

Pathétique was heard only once in his lifetime: the symphony's second performance, three weeks after the premiere, was at a concert in his memory.

Which newly invented instrument gives the Sugar Plum Fairy her tinkling sound in Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker?

The celesta, patented in Paris in 1886, was still a novelty when Tchaikovsky first tried it, in a little-known symphonic ballad the year before the ballet made its sound famous.

Tchaikovsky's opera The Queen of Spades is based on a story by which writer?

Alexander Pushkin's tale of a man undone by a dead countess and her secret of three winning cards became the opera, which Tchaikovsky composed in just 44 days in Florence.

Which pianist and composer co-founded the Russian Musical Society and taught Tchaikovsky composition?

Anton Rubinstein admired his pupil's gifts but distrusted his modern streak: when Tchaikovsky submitted his First Symphony for performance in Saint Petersburg, his old teacher turned it down.

Tchaikovsky's conservatory thesis, which won a silver medal, was a cantata on which text?

Schiller's 'Ode to Joy' is the poem Beethoven set in his Ninth Symphony; Tchaikovsky's setting earned him his medal, yet a leading nationalist critic lambasted it in the press as feeble.

At the brand-new Moscow Conservatory in 1866, the freshly graduated Tchaikovsky was hired to teach which subject?

Music theory was a chore to teach, he found, and in 1878 a patron's allowance let him resign from the conservatory to compose full-time.

Which famous conductor led the first public performance of a Tchaikovsky work, his Characteristic Dances, in 1865?

Johann Strauss II, Vienna's 'Waltz King', conducted the piece at a summer concert in Pavlovsk; its composer, still a student, only heard the news after returning to Saint Petersburg.

Which composer's opera did Tchaikovsky, writing home in 1876, call incredible nonsense with flashes of extraordinary beauty?

Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold opened the first Bayreuth festival in 1876. Tchaikovsky, there as a critic, was captivated by the staging but left cold by the music.

What was the nationalist group of five Russian composers with whom Tchaikovsky had a mixed relationship?

The Mighty Handful gathered around Mily Balakirev and distrusted conservatory training, which left the conservatory-trained Tchaikovsky caught between Russia's two musical camps.

On which work, his first recognised masterpiece, did Tchaikovsky collaborate with Balakirev in 1869?

Romeo and Juliet took shape under Balakirev's coaching and only after two radical revisions; it became the first Tchaikovsky work to enter the international repertoire.

Which pianist premiered Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto after a Moscow colleague savaged it?

Hans von Bülow gave the premiere in Boston in 1875, an ocean away from Moscow; the colleague who had torn the concerto apart later withdrew his criticism and became its champion.

What did Tchaikovsky do with the manuscripts of his first two operas, The Voyevoda and Undina?

Destroyed them, though not for good: after his death The Voyevoda was pieced back together from the orchestral parts used at its premiere.

Tchaikovsky's opera The Oprichnik is set among the feared personal guard of which Russian ruler?

Ivan the Terrible's oprichniks carried out his repressions in 16th-century Moscow. Tchaikovsky wrote the libretto himself and lifted almost the whole opening scene from his first opera.

Which Gogol story is the basis of Tchaikovsky's prize-winning opera Vakula the Smith?

Christmas Eve won over the jury but not the public; Tchaikovsky reworked the opera years later under a new title, and Rimsky-Korsakov set the same tale in 1895.

In 1877 Tchaikovsky married which former student, who had written to declare her love, only to flee within weeks?

Antonina Miliukova remained his legal wife until he died, because she refused every request for a divorce; he fled abroad within weeks of the wedding and never lived with her again.

Which Belgian soprano was Tchaikovsky briefly engaged to in 1868?

Désirée Artôt left Moscow on tour and in 1869 married a Spanish baritone from her own company instead; Tchaikovsky only heard the news second-hand.

Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky's long-time patroness, was the widow of a tycoon in which industry?

Railways made her husband a multimillionaire, and his widow spent the fortune on music: besides funding Tchaikovsky, she hired the young Claude Debussy to play in her household.

What unusual condition governed Tchaikovsky's relationship with Nadezhda von Meck?

They agreed never to meet and, bar a wordless chance encounter or two, kept to it through more than a decade of letters, even after her son married his niece.

Which opera did Tchaikovsky finish abroad early in 1878, in the months after fleeing his marriage?

Eugene Onegin was finished in the same burst as the Fourth Symphony and the Violin Concerto, paid for by a patron's allowance that let him roam Europe instead of teaching.

The 1812 Overture, a Fourth of July favourite, marks Russia's defeat of which invader?

Napoleon's failed 1812 invasion is the subject; Tchaikovsky wrote the piece to order in about six weeks and predicted it would be 'very loud and noisy', with little artistic merit.

The score of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture famously calls for which weapons to be fired in the finale?

Cannon need not be real: Tchaikovsky's own note asked for the stage device theatres used to imitate a shot, and indoor performances often make do with a bass drum.

Which friend, director of the Moscow Conservatory, is the 'great artist' mourned in the dedication of Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio?

Nikolai Rubinstein died in Paris in 1881. A year earlier Tchaikovsky had refused his patroness a piano trio, saying he disliked the combination; grief changed his mind, and it is the only one he wrote.

Tchaikovsky's tone poem Francesca da Rimini depicts a pair of doomed lovers from which medieval poem?

Dante's Inferno gripped him on a train journey: he read the canto about Francesca and, as he wrote to his brother, was seized with a desire to turn it into a symphonic poem.

Which pianist won the first International Tchaikovsky Competition, held in Cold War Moscow in 1958?

Van Cliburn, a 23-year-old American, played Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto in the final; the judges checked with Khrushchev before crowning him, and New York gave him a ticker-tape parade.

Tchaikovsky befriended which composer in 1888 and brought him to Moscow to conduct two years later?

Antonín Dvořák and Tchaikovsky made friends in Prague, admiring each other's music; yet when the Czech came to conduct his own works in Russia in 1890, the host who had arranged the visit was away in Italy.

Which famous concert hall did Tchaikovsky help inaugurate as a guest conductor in 1891?

Carnegie Hall's opening festival brought him across the Atlantic, where he conducted his own works to enthusiastic audiences in New York, Baltimore and Philadelphia.

Tchaikovsky's Manfred Symphony of 1885 follows a brooding dramatic poem by which British writer?

Lord Byron's Manfred was a subject urged on him by Balakirev, who supplied the plan; keeping that promise cost Tchaikovsky a whole summer of immense effort.

Which university awarded Tchaikovsky an honorary doctorate in 1893?

Cambridge conferred the doctorate in June 1893 during its Musical Society's jubilee, sealing his standing as a world figure only months before his death.

To whom did Tchaikovsky dedicate his Sixth Symphony?

His nephew Bob, then 21, had become the great attachment of his last years; scholars read the dedication and his letters about the young man as evidence that he was in love.

Which 1940 Disney film set dancing mushrooms, fairies and fish to Tchaikovsky's Nutcracker Suite?

Fantasia drew on the concert suite, a success from its 1892 premiere; the full ballet, which Tchaikovsky thought far weaker than The Sleeping Beauty, did not succeed in his lifetime.

To what is Tchaikovsky's death traditionally attributed?

Cholera from unboiled water, drunk during an epidemic, is the official account. Rumours of suicide spread at once and were revived in the 1980s, but no documentary evidence supports them.

Where is Tchaikovsky buried, near Borodin, Glinka and Mussorgsky?

Tikhvin Cemetery lies inside Saint Petersburg's Alexander Nevsky Monastery. The tsar paid for the funeral from his own purse and had the Imperial Theatres organise it.

Which composer did Tchaikovsky consider his favourite?

Mozart was the composer he revered above all: in 1887 he orchestrated four Mozart pieces as the suite Mozartiana and conducted its premiere himself.

Which French opera, which Tchaikovsky adored, is echoed in the children's chorus that opens his The Queen of Spades?

Carmen had scandalised its first audiences in Paris, but Tchaikovsky, who caught the original production, called it a masterpiece that summed up a whole musical epoch.

Which violinist first rejected Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, then championed and taught it?

Leopold Auer judged parts of the solo unsuited to the violin and put off playing it; the hurt composer changed the dedication, and Auer later performed and taught the concerto in his own edited version.

Which critic, reviewing the Vienna premiere of Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto, wrote of music that stinks to the ear?

Eduard Hanslick savaged the concerto after its 1881 Vienna premiere, yet the piece he panned went on to become a staple of the violin repertoire.

A cellist rearranged which Tchaikovsky piece so freely that for decades only his version was published and played?

Rococo Variations was reshuffled by its dedicatee, Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, who dropped one variation and reordered the rest; Tchaikovsky fumed but let it stand, and his own version was not published until the 1950s.

Which choreographer worked with Tchaikovsky on The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker?

Marius Petipa sent him exacting instructions for each number, down to the tempo and the number of bars; when Petipa fell ill, his assistant took over The Nutcracker's choreography.

Which dance was Tchaikovsky's musical code for the Romanovs and Russian patriotism?

The polonaise had an imperial pedigree in Russia: a de facto anthem of the empire, written in 1791 under Catherine the Great, was one, so audiences heard the dance as the sound of the throne.

Which city's carnival and street songs inspired Tchaikovsky's Capriccio Italien, sketched there in 1880?

Rome gave him the tunes, gathered partly from songbooks and partly by ear in the streets; the opening fanfare copies a bugle call he heard daily from the barracks beside his hotel.

Which of Tchaikovsky's younger twin brothers wrote the libretto for The Queen of Spades?

Modest also wrote the libretto for Iolanta, and after 1893 he became his brother's first biographer and founded the Tchaikovsky museum at Klin.

Which novelist, seated beside Tchaikovsky at a concert, burst into tears on hearing the Andante from his First String Quartet?

Leo Tolstoy wept at a Moscow Conservatory concert held in his honour in 1876; Tchaikovsky later wrote in his diary that his pride as a composer had never been so flattered.

Which member of The Five savaged Tchaikovsky's opera The Oprichnik in the press?

César Cui, the group's sharpest pen, led the critics against it, and Tchaikovsky came to agree with them, even though the opera had pleased its first audiences.

Tchaikovsky wrote his Marche Slave in 1876 for a charity concert backing which nation's war against the Ottoman Empire?

Serbia had Russia's sympathy as a fellow Slavic nation; Tchaikovsky built the march on Serbian folk tunes and, until it was published, called it his 'Serbo-Russian March'.

Which ballet, a disappointment for Tchaikovsky at its 1877 Moscow premiere, is known today from a staging made after his death?

Swan Lake suffered in 1877 from weak choreography and a poor orchestra; the version danced today descends from an 1895 Saint Petersburg staging, mounted a little over a year after its composer died.

Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker is loosely based on a fantasy tale by which writer?

E. T. A. Hoffmann's 1816 story is darker and more troubling than the ballet, so its creators worked from Alexandre Dumas's lighter French adaptation instead.

Which Russian opera, seen at ten, left a lasting impression on the young Tchaikovsky?

A Life for the Tsar is by Mikhail Glinka; his mother took him to it on the trip that enrolled him at boarding school, and he later studied Glinka's scores closely.

Which composer did Tchaikovsky the critic love for warmth and passion yet fault for poor orchestration?

Robert Schumann was a favourite all the same, and scholars hear his influence in Tchaikovsky's own harmony and piano writing more than any other Western composer's.

Which older ballet, long a favourite of his, did Tchaikovsky study in score when writing ballets of his own?

Giselle. He first saw it as a ten-year-old schoolboy in Saint Petersburg, danced by Carlotta Grisi, the ballerina who had created the title role in Paris.

Which tone poem did Tchaikovsky premiere a week after conducting his Fifth Symphony in 1888?

Hamlet. Actor Lucien Guitry had asked him for music for a charity staging of the play; the production was cancelled, but Tchaikovsky finished the piece as a concert overture anyway.

In January 1887 Tchaikovsky made his breakthrough as a conductor at the Bolshoi premiere of which of his operas?

Cherevichki, 'The Slippers', reworked his earlier opera Vakula the Smith. Its success eased a lifelong stage fright, and within a year he was in demand as a conductor across Europe.

Kamenka, the estate of Tchaikovsky's sister's in-laws, had earlier been a centre for which Russian rebels?

The Decembrists. The father of Tchaikovsky's brother-in-law was one of them, and was sent to Siberia after the failed 1825 revolt; his wife followed him into exile.

At whose instigation did the Tsar grant Tchaikovsky his lifetime pension?

Ivan Vsevolozhsky, director of the Imperial Theatres, went on to commission The Sleeping Beauty from him, drafting its scenario and sketching the costumes himself.