Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840 in Votkinsk, and died on November 6, 1893 in St. Petersburg at 53 years of age. Tchaikovsky’s family had a long history of military service. His father had served in the military as an engineer and was later appointed to oversee an iron mine in Votkinsk. Tchaikovsky began his formal education at the school of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg at the age of 10. He was to become a civil servant despite his musical inclination. At the age of 19, he graduated and began his short lived civil service career at the Ministry of Justice. He worked there for three years and his highest promotion was to senior assitant. Tchaikovsky would later abandoned his career at the Ministry of Justice to persue his passion for music fully. The Russian Music Society (RMS) was founded in 1859, the year he began working as a civil servant. He would begin taking lessons in music through the RMS in his leisure time. By 1863, he abandoned his career and began pursuing music and in 1865, Tchaikovsky graduated from the St.Petersburg Conservatory. He would spend the rest of his life composing some of the most critically acclaimed music to ever be produced by a Russian. He was dissimilar to many of his contemporaries in Russian because his music was not nationalistic. His music has a definite Western quality to it and was praised for it. Tchaikovsky received much notoriety, fame, and wealth during his life. There is still a great deal of mystery and speculation about his personal life. For example, his sexuality, his younger brother, Modest, published a three volume biography, which has been criticized for the carful censoring of any material dealing with Tchaikovsky’s homosexual love affairs. Modest is excused for his censorship because he is believed to have been protecting his brother’s and his reputation and hiding his own homosexuality. Unfortunately the speculation on Tchaikovsky’s sexuality, has often times overshadowed his great musical accomplishments for notoriety in recent times.
