leadingtone:

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840 - 1893), nominated by gigglebug, g-flat-lydian, and teafully, is the leading tone’s featured composer for February. 

Born at Votkinsk, Udmurtia to a well-to-do engineer and his wife, Pyotr Ilyich showed extraordinary musical gifts from an early age. His family was supportive, but later demanded that he pursue a career in the civil service—to this end he was sent at age ten to a boarding school attached to the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in Saint Petersburg to await admission to the mother institution at age twelve. During this time his mother died back at home, an event from which it is possible that the already emotionally volatile child never recovered.

He entered his professional field at age nineteen, but by 1863 had given up clerkdom to pursue music full time. Tchaikovsky was a prominent pupil at the St. Petersburg Conservatory, where he studied with Anton Rubinstein and Nikolai Zaremba. His status as the protégé of Rubinstein, a Westward-looking composer, automatically put him in a position of conflict with “The Five,” the group of Russian nationalist composers led by Balakirev and Rimsky-Korsakov. When Tchaikovsky sought professional and artistic advice from his more experienced compatriots, he frequently received excoriation in return. 

But Tchaikovsky persevered to emerge in the 1870s as an important and internationally acclaimed composer with a prestigious teaching post at the Moscow Conservatory. His fortunes improved further in 1878 when he began to enjoy the patronage of the wealthy and elusive Nadezhda von Meck—her support allowed him to resign his post at the Conservatory to concentrate on composing and touring until it was inexplicably withdrawn in 1890. By this time, Tchaikovsky had been honored by the Tsar with the Order of St. Vladimir and had become a veritable celebrity. He visited the United States in 1891 to participate in the inauguration of Carnegie Hall, and in 1892 he was made a member of France’s Académie des Beaux-Arts. 

The circumstances surrounding Tchaikovsky’s sudden death in November 1893 remain poorly understand—the most persistent account gives cholera as the cause, but some have suggested suicide.  

Much has been written—and several fairly terrible films made—about the emotional turmoil he suffered with regards to his family, his repressed homosexuality, his perennial uncertainty of his own artistic merits, and other factors. Because of this, it is sometimes difficult to study Tchaikovsky’s music objectively, to resist the temptation to imagine tortured phantoms behind glowing waltz melodies. That is, while the symphonies are nothing if not soulful, they offer to us vastly more than an abstract account of their composer’s considerable personal troubles. 

Tchaikovsky remains one of the most popular composers among the listening and concert-going public. His Slavic melodic prowess has scarcely been equaled in its robustness of expression, his orchestrations effortlessly spring forth from the scores, and his music in general is full of finely-wrought drama easily enjoyable by casual listeners. At the same time, he was mindful of the Western tradition and eschewed most of the radical experiments of his contemporaries, preferring instead to lend his own distinctive voice and colors to the standard canon—ultimately a conservative force who appeared, outwardly at least, to take relatively little interest in the Zeitgeist of which he was a part.

His output lacks the consistency of a Brahms or a Beethoven—there are gaps in quality, arguably a few severe ones, and some have criticized certain compositions (especially in the larger forms) as overly saccharine and ambulatory. But this is not to say that the Russian master was merely a creator of “great moments.” Tchaikovsky’s ability to organically derive large and incredibly rich structures from very modest materials places him, at his best, in the same league as classical music’s greatest master builders. 

Today the leading tone pays tribute to a great personal and popular favorite, a unique composer whose greatest attributes are sometimes overlooked because of the ubiquity of his music, ubiquity which persists for all the right reasons.