Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

His great-grandfather, a Zaporozhian Cossack named Fyodor Chaika, distinguished himself under Peter the Great at the Battle of Poltava in 1709.

Tchaikovsky's mother, Alexandra Andreyevna (née d'Assier), was the second of Ilya's three wives, the first having died years before.

She was 18 years her husband's junior and French and German on her father's side.

Both Ilya and Alexandra were trained in the arts, including music—a necessity as a posting to a remote area of Russia also meant a need for entertainment, whether in private or at social gatherings.

Of his six siblings, Tchaikovsky was close to his sister Alexandra and twin brothers Anatoly and Modest.

Alexandra's marriage to Lev Davydov would produce seven children and lend Tchaikovsky the only real family life he would know as an adult, especially during his years of wandering.

One of those children, Vladimir Davydov, who went by the nickname 'Bob', would become very close to him.

Tchaikovsky wrote some of the most popular concert and theatrical music in the current classical repertoire, including the ballets Swan Lake and The Nutcracker, the 1812 Overture, his First Piano Concerto, Violin Concerto, the Romeo and Juliet Overture-Fantasy, several symphonies, and the opera Eugene Onegin.

Although musically precocious, Tchaikovsky was educated for a career as a civil servant as there was little opportunity for a musical career in Russia at the time and no system of public music education.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893) was a Russian composer of the Romantic period.

He was the first Russian composer whose music would make a lasting impression internationally.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on 7 May 1840 in Votkinsk, a small town in Vyatka Governorate (present-day Udmurtia) near the banks of the Kama River, and not far from the Ural Mountains in the Russian Empire, into a family with a long history of military service.

His father, Ilya Petrovich Tchaikovsky, had served as a lieutenant colonel and engineer in the Department of Mines, and would manage the Kamsko-Votkinsk Ironworks.

His grandfather, Pyotr Fedorovich Tchaikovsky, was born in the village of Nikolaevka, Yekaterinoslav Governorate, Russian Empire (present-day Mykolaivka, Luhansk Oblast, Ukraine), and served first as a physician's assistant in the army and later as city governor of Glazov in Vyatka.

In 1844, the family hired Fanny Dürbach, a 22-year-old French governess.

Four-and-a-half-year-old Tchaikovsky was initially thought too young to study alongside his older brother Nikolai and a niece of the family.

His insistence convinced Dürbach otherwise.

By the age of six, he had become fluent in French and German.

Tchaikovsky also became attached to the young woman; her affection for him was reportedly a counter to his mother's coldness and emotional distance from him, though others assert that the mother doted on her son.

Dürbach saved much of Tchaikovsky's work from this period, including his earliest known compositions, and became a source of several childhood anecdotes.

Tchaikovsky began piano lessons at age five.

Precocious, within three years he had become as adept at reading sheet music as his teacher.

Tchaikovsky's parents, initially supportive, hired a tutor, bought an orchestrion (a form of barrel organ that could imitate elaborate orchestral effects), and encouraged his piano study for both aesthetic and practical reasons.

However, they decided in 1850 to send Tchaikovsky to the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in Saint Petersburg.

When an opportunity for such an education arose, he entered the nascent Saint Petersburg Conservatory, from which he graduated in 1865.

The formal Western-oriented teaching that Tchaikovsky received there set him apart from composers of the contemporary nationalist movement embodied by the Russian composers of The Five with whom his professional relationship was mixed.

Tchaikovsky's training set him on a path to reconcile what he had learned with the native musical practices to which he had been exposed from childhood.

From that reconciliation, he forged a personal but unmistakably Russian style.

The principles that governed melody, harmony, and other fundamentals of Russian music diverged from those that governed Western European music, which seemed to defeat the potential for using Russian music in large-scale Western composition or for forming a composite style, and it caused personal antipathies that dented Tchaikovsky's self-confidence.

Russian culture exhibited a split personality, with its native and adopted elements having drifted apart increasingly since the time of Peter the Great.

That resulted in uncertainty among the intelligentsia about the country's national identity, an ambiguity mirrored in Tchaikovsky's career.

Despite his many popular successes, Tchaikovsky's life was punctuated by personal crises and depression.

Contributory factors included his early separation from his mother for boarding school followed by his mother's early death, the death of his close friend and colleague Nikolai Rubinstein, his failed marriage with Antonina Miliukova, and the collapse of his 13-year association with the wealthy patroness Nadezhda von Meck.

Tchaikovsky's homosexuality, which he kept private, has traditionally also been considered a major factor though some scholars have played down its importance.

His dedication of his Sixth symphony to his nephew Vladimir "Bob" Davydov and his feelings expressed about Davydov in letters to others, especially following Davydov's suicide, have been cited as evidence for a romantic love between the two.

Tchaikovsky's sudden death at the age of 53 is generally ascribed to cholera, but there is an ongoing debate as to whether cholera was indeed the cause and whether the death was accidental or intentional.

While his music has remained popular among audiences, critical opinions were initially mixed.

Some Russians did not feel it was sufficiently representative of native musical values and expressed suspicion that Europeans accepted the music for its Western elements.

In an apparent reinforcement of the latter claim, some Europeans lauded Tchaikovsky for offering music more substantive than exoticism, and said he transcended the stereotypes of Russian classical music.

Others dismissed Tchaikovsky's music as deficient because it did not stringently follow Western principles.