Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was a Russian composer especially known for three very popular ballets: Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker. He also composed operas, symphonies, choral works, concertos, and various other classical works. His work became dominant in 19th century Russia, and he became known both in and outside Russia as its greatest musical talent.

Tchaikovsky and his times While the contributions of the Russian nationalistic group The Five were important in their own right in developing an independent Russian voice and consciousness in classical music, Tchaikovsky's formal conservatory training allowed him to write works with Western-oriented attitudes and techniques, showcasing a wide range and breadth of technique from a poised "Classical" form simulating 18th century Rococo elegance to a style more characteristic of Russian nationalists or a musical idiom expressly to channel his own overwrought emotions.Brown, New Grove, 18:606.

Even with this compositional diversity, the outlook in Tchaikovsky's music remains essentially Russian, both in its use of native folk song and its composer's deep absorption in Russian life and ways of thought. Writing about Tchaikovsky's ballet The Sleeping Beauty in an open letter to impresario Sergei Diaghilev that was printed in the Times of London, composer Igor Stravinsky contended that Tchaikovsky's music was as Russian as Pushkin's verse or Glinka's song, since Tchaikovsky "drew unconsciously from the true, popular sources" of the Russian race.Stravinsky, Igor, "An Open Letter to Diaghilev," The Times, London, 18 October 1921. As quoted in Holden, 51. This Russianness of mindset ensured that Tchaikovsky would not become a mere imitator of Western technique. Tchaikovsky's natural gift for melody, based mainly on themes of tremendous eloquence and emotive power and supported by matching resources in harmony and orchestration, has always made his music appealing to the public. However, his hard-won professional technique and the power to harness it to express his emotional life gave Tchaikovsky the ability to realize his potential more fully than any other Russian composer of his time.Brown, New Grove, 18:606–7, 628.

Ballets

"Tchaikovsky was made for ballet," writes musicologist David BrownBrown, Final, 212. Before him, musicologist Francis Maes writes, ballet music was written by specialists, such as Ludwig Minkus and Cesare Pugni, "who wrote nothing else and knew all the tricks of the trade."Maes, 144. Brown explains that Tchaikovsky's gift for melody and orchestration, his ability to write memorable dance music with great fluency and his responsiveness to a theatrical atmosphere made him uniquely qualified in writing for the genre.Brown, New Grove (1980), 18:614. Above all, Brown writes, he had "an ability to create and sustain atmosphere: above all, a faculty for suggesting and supporting movement ... animated by an abundant inventiveness, above all rhythmic, within the individual phrase."Brown, Crisis, 78. In comparing Tchaikovsky to French composer Léo Delibes, whose ballets Tchaikovsky adored, Brown writes that while the two composers shared similar talents, the Russian's passion places him in a higher league than that of the Frenchman. Where Delibes' music remains decorative, Tchaikovsky's touches the senses and achieves a deeper significance.Brown, Final, 212–3. Tchaikovsky's three ballets, Maes says, forced an aesthetic re-evaluation of music for that genre.Maes, 148.

Brown calls Tchaikovsky's first ballet, Swan Lake, "a very remarkable and bold achievement."Brown, Crisis, 77. The genre on the whole was mainly "a decorative spectacle" when Swan Lake was written, which made Tchaikovsky's attempt to "incorporate a drama that was more than a convenient series of incidents for mechanically shifting from one divertissement to the next ... almost visionary." However, while the composer showed considerable aptitude in writing music that focused on the drama of the story, the demand for set pieces undercut his potential for complete success. The lengthy divertissements he supplied for two of the ballet's four acts display a "commendable variety of character" but divert action (and audience attention) away from the main plot.Brown, Crisis, 80, New Grove (1980), 18:613–4 Moreover, Brown adds, the formal dance music is uneven, some of it "quite ordinary, a little even trite."Brown, Crisis, 80. Despite these handicaps, Swan Lake gives Tchaikovsky many opportunities to showcase his talent for melodic writing and, as Brown points out, has proved "indestructible" in popular appeal.Brown, Crisis, 85. The oboe solo associated with Odette and her swans, which first appears at the end of Act 1, is one of the composer's best–known themes.Evans, 194.

Tchaikovsky considered his next ballet, The Sleeping Beauty, one of his finest works, according to Brown. The structure of the scenario proved more successful than that of Swan Lake. While the prologue and first two acts contain a certain number of set dances, they are not designed for gratuitous choreographic decoration but have at least some marginal relevance to the main plot. These dances are also far more striking than their counterparts in Swan Lake, as several of them are character pieces from fairy tales such as Puss in Boots and Little Red Riding Hood, which elicited a far more individualized type of invention from the composer. Likewise, the musical ideas in these sections are more striking, pointed and precise. This characterful musical invention, combined with a structural fluency, a keen feeling for atmosphere and a well-structured plot, makes The Sleeping Beauty perhaps Tchaikovsky's most consistently successful ballet.Brown, New Grove, 18:624.

The Nutcracker, on the other hand, is one of Tchaikovsky's best known works. While it has been criticized as the least substantial of the composer's three ballets, it should be remembered that Tchaikovsky was restricted by a rigorous scenario supplied by Marius Petipa. This scenario provided no opportunity for the expression of human feelings beyond the most trivial and confined Tchaikovsky mostly within a world of tinsel, sweets and fantasy. Yet, at its best, the melodies are charming and pretty, and by this time Tchaikovsky's virtuosity at orchestration and counterpoint ensured an endless fascination in the surface attractiveness of the score.Brown, New Grove, 18:625.

Operas Tchaikovsky completed ten operas, although one (Undina) is mostly lost and another (Vakula the Smith) exists in two significantly different versions. He also began or considered writing at least 20 others; he once declared that to refrain from writing operas was a heroism he did not possess.Harold Rosenthal and John Warrack, The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Opera, 2nd ed. (1979), p. 492. (In fact, one project Tchaikovsky had planned before his death was an opera based on Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet, for which he had written an overture-fantasia much earlier in his career; a duet intended potentially for this opera was completed by his friend Sergei Taneyev and published posthumously.)Brown, Final, 499. Nevertheless, this need to plan or compose an opera was a constant preoccupation.Wiley, New Grove, 25:160.

According to musicologist Gerald Abraham, the operas on the whole embody an enormous mass of music far too beautiful and interesting to be ignored. Moreover, he maintains, Tchaikovsky's search for operatic subjects, along with his views on their nature and treatment and his own work on librettos, throw considerable light on his creative personality.Abraham, 124. Nevertheless, according to musicologist Francis Maes, most of Tchaikovsky's operas failed for three reasons. First, the composer could not get good librettos, despite continued requests to some of Russia's leading playwrights and his brother Modest. Second, he was no Verdi, Puccini or Leoncavallo. While he could write music that was often beautiful and sometimes very moving, it was generally not as arresting dramatically as anything those three provided.Wiley, New Grove (2001), 25:150. Third, and perhaps most sadly, Tchaikovsky's enthusiasm for opera writing did not match his theatrical sense. Apparently either unaware of this deficiency or unable to curb his excitement long enough to take a cold, hard look at the true stage-worthiness of a libretto, he seemed destined to repeat his failures.Wiley, New Grove (2001), 25:150–1.

Tchaikovsky broke this pattern twice. Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades were both strong stories, worthy of setting to music. Their author, Alexander Pushkin was a master storyteller. He was also a keen observer of human nature and his wry, penetrating observations of the human condition could be chilling and heart-breaking in the extreme. Moreover, both stories were a perfect match for the composer's talents. Tchaikovsky matched Pushkin's irony and detachment in Eugene Onegin, falling back on a series of musical conventions that, in turn, echoed the literary codes the author used in his "novel in verse."Maes, 130; Taruskin, Grove Opera, 4:666–7. More traditional writers, such as Brown, also suggest that a passion and sympathy by the composer for the heroine, Tatiyana, heightened by parallels in the story to events in his own life, may have influenced the quality of music he supplied for Onegin.Brown, New Grove (1980), 18:617.

With The Queen of Spades, Modest's transposition of the story's timeline in the libretto to the 18th century was a boon for Tchaikovsky, whose favorite composer (and the one he most liked to emulate) was Mozart. The change allowed him to compose, in addition to impassioned love music, a number of 18th century pastiches depicting various social milieus.Taruskin, Grove Opera, 4:669. Also, as the supernatural gradually takes possession of the characters, Tchaikovsky matches it with equally ghostly music.Maes, 152–4; Taruskin, Grove Opera, 4:668–9. He had already experimented in this vein in the transformation scene of The Sleeping Beauty showing an adeptness for orchestrating a strange, even unnerving sound world of dark fantasy. He would do so again in Act One of The Nutcracker,Brown, Man and Music, 405. capturing what artist, critic and historian Alexandre Benois would call a "world of captivating nightmares" and "a mixture of strange truth and convincing invention."Benois, Alexandre, Moi vospominaniia (My Reminiscences), vol. 1 (bks. 1–3), 603. As quoted in Volkov, 124.

The Voyevoda (Воевода – The Voivode, Op. 3, 1867–1868) Full score destroyed by composer, but posthumously reconstructed from sketches and orchestral parts. Not related to the much later symphonic ballad The Voyevoda, Op. 78. Undina (Ундина or Undine, 1869) Not completed. Only a march sequence from this opera saw the light of day, as the second movement of his Symphony No. 2 in C minor and a few other segments are occasionally heard as concert pieces. While Tchaikovsky revised the Second Symphony twice in his lifetime, he did not alter the second movement (taken from the Undina material) during either revision. The rest of the score of Undina was destroyed by the composer. The Oprichnik (Опричник), 1870–1872 Premiere 24 April [OS 12 April], 1874, Saint Petersburg Vakula the Smith (Кузнец Вакула or Kuznets Vakula), Op. 14, 1874; Revised later as Cherevichki, premiere 6 December [OS 24 November], 1876, Saint Petersburg Eugene Onegin (Евгений Онегин or Yevgeny Onegin), Op. 24, 1877–1878 Premiere 29 March [OS 17 March], 1879 at the Moscow Conservatory The Maid of Orleans (Орлеанская дева or Orleanskaya deva), 1878–1879 Premiere 25 February [OS 13 February], 1881, Saint Petersburg Mazepa (or Mazeppa) (Мазепа), 1881–1883 Premiere 15 February [OS 3 February], 1884, Moscow Cherevichki (Черевички; revision of Vakula the Smith) 1885 Premiere 31 January [OS 19 January], 1887, Moscow) The Enchantress (or The Sorceress, Чародейка or Charodeyka), 1885–1887