Peter Tchaikovsky Essay -- essays research papers

The Life of Peter TchaikovskyPeter Ilyich Tchaikovsky, also spelled Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, was born in Votkinsk, in the city of Vyatka, Russia, May 7, 1840. Second in a family of cardinal sons and one daughter, to whom he was extremely devoted. Once in his early teens when he was in school at St. Petersburg and his mother started to drive to another city, he had to be held back while she got into the carriage, and the moment he was free ran and tried to hold the wheels. There is an anecdote of Tchaikovskys earliest years that gives us a clue to the paradox of his personality. Passionately kissing the map of Russia and then, one celestial latitude to state, spitting on the other countries, he was reminded by his nurse that she herself was French. "Yes," he said, accepting her criticism with perfect sweetness and affectionate docility, "I cover France with my hand." The child is father of the man here we have already Tchaikovskys unnamed two-sidedness on one han d his intense emotionality in every last(predicate) personal matters, his headstrong impetuosity, leaping first and looking afterwards on the other his candor and modesty, his intelligent acceptance of criticism, even his carefulness and bang-up workmanship-he had covered France with his hand" If he had only been able to reconcile that lifelong feud between his over-personal heart and his magnanimous mind, he would have been relieve rarityless suffering. But he was not in his music his self-criticism, as on of his best biographers, Edwin Evans, has remarked, "came after and not during composition"-he destroyed home run after score. And in daily life he never wise(p) to apply the advice of a wit tot he victim of a temperament like his "less remorse and more reform." As a youth he reluctantly studied law, as much calibre by it as Schumann had been, and even became a petty clerk in the Ministry of Justice. But in his early twenties he rebelled, and against h is familys wishes had the courage to constitute himself into the study of music at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. He was a ready improviser, contend well for dancing and had a naturally rich sense of harmony, tho was so little schooled as to be astonished when a cousin-german told him it was possible to modulate form any key to another. He went oft to the Italian operas which at that quantify almost monopolized the Russian stage, and laid t... ... entrance of all this sunshine he partially forgot, or put aside, his shyness, and took up the baton again, at first with many qualms, but gradually with so much assurance that in 1888 he made an international conducting tour, look in Leipzig, Hamburg, Prague, Paris, and London. Three years later he even ventured to amaze across the Atlantic and conduct his own works in in the altogether York at the ceremonies of the opening Carnegie Hall, as may be read in his letters in amusing details of his triumph and homesickness. And for the summers there were a series of modest but comfortable country houses in Russia where he could compose in peace, from Maidanova, with which he began to Klin, near Moscow. only when at the end of 1890, three years before his death, came the inevitable rupture with Madame von Meck, and by that time he was financially independent, so the break affected his spirits more than his music. In 1893 he wrote at Klin his most famous work, the "Pathetic" Symphony, and conducted it at St. Petersburg on Oct. 28. It was coolly received, and he did not live to witness its success. Only a few days later he drank a glaze of unfiltered water, and died of cholera, Nov. 6, 1893.