Tchaikovsky's Marriage Life...

Marriage

Around the same time, he began his long association with the multi-millionairness Nadezhda von Meck, the widow of a railway tycoon, who befriended the composer, commissioned his works and supported him financially, on conditions they should never meet. Her patronage enabled Tchaikovsky to concentrate on composition, and rescued him from the emotional chaos by his hasty and imprudent marriage in 1877 to a mentally unbalanced music student, Antonina Milyukova, who had pestered him with love letters.

Tchaikovsky and his wife Antonina Milyukova

Tchaikovsky had evidently hoped that marriage would bring "normality" to his life, but found himself unacle to reconcile his wife's physical demands with his homosexuality. A n attempt at reconciliation brought him to the brink of suicide, and within weeks of the wedding he fled to the safety of his brother's house in St Peterburg. Tchaikovsky never saw his wife again, although they were never divorced. In 1896, 3 years after his death, she was declared insane and spent the rest of her life in an asylum.

Nadezhda von Meck