The Early Life of Tchaikovsky...

The Early Life of Tchaikovsky
Extreme left: Pyotr Tchaikovsky. Seated left to right are: composer's mother Alexandra Andreyevna, his sister Alexandra, brother Ippolit, and father Ilya Petrovich; standing are: sister Zinaida and brother Nikolai. From the collection of the Tchaikovsky House-Museum at Klin.

Tchaikovsky was the son of a mining engineer, and was born near the Urals. From his delicate, epileptic, French mother he inherited his hypersensitive nature and a tendancy to hypochondria. When he was 8, the family moved to St Petersburg, where Tchaikovsky enrolled in the junior department of the School of Jurisprudence, a training-ground for civil service. By this time, he had aquired twin younger brothers, Anatoly and Modest. He was exceptionally close to his mother, and her shocking death in cholera epidemic when Tchaikovsky was 14 was a trauma from which he never really recovered.

Nikolay Rubinstein(1835-81)

Tchaikovsky graduated from School of Jurisprudence in 1859, but found life in civil service uncongenial. When a new music conservatory opened in St Petersburg in 1862, he enrolled as a student. He graduated in 1866, and found a job as a harmony teacher at the Moscow Conservatory, which had just been established by his mentor, the pianist and the composer Nikolay Rubinstein(1835-81). The successful performance of an early overture in March 1866 encouraged him to start work on a symphony, entitled Winter Daydreams, which was performed under Rubinstein's baton in 1868. Modelled on Mendelssohn's Italian and Scottish Symphonies, it uses melodies influenced by Russian folk tunes.