Tchaikovsky Research Paper

The Life of Peter Tchaikovsky

Peter 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 five 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 Tchaikovsky's earliest years that gives us a clue to the paradox of his personality. Passionately kissing the map of Russia and then, one regrets 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 covered France with my hand."
Nine years older than he and living in a socially different world, rich and apparently some what spoiled and autocratic but at any rate sincere in her love for his music, she had the good sense or the good luck (it was hard to tell which) to stipulate from the first that they should have no personal intercourse. They could not be sure to avoid one or two casual meetings at musical events, but it is said they never spoke to each other-they who wrote so inexhaustibly. Nothing could have been better suited to the queer psychology of Tchaikovsky. Secure from upsetting attacks of his personal privacy, he was provided form 1877 on, not only with an income of 6,000 rouble, which enabled him to give up teaching but with a tireless listener to all his opinions, beliefs, impressions, hopes, despairs, and