It is impossible to understand Tchaikovsky's music fullywithout understanding something of the man. All Romanticart is a conscious expression of the artist's emotions and anextension of his dream-world; but in Tchaikovsky's case theemotions ranged between such violent extremes, and thedream-world was so vivid and real to the composer, that hismusic is autobiographical to a quite unusual if not a unique degree.

This autobiographical, nakedly emotional character of Tchaikovsky's music at one time told against its success, especially with individuals or civilisations (like the French) that regarded such lack of reticence as distasteful or simply barbaric. Now, however, in the middle of the 20th century≈ when music has been opened to huge new audiences com­posed of people with no tradition of emotional reticence≈ Tchaikovsky has achieved a huge popularity such as he could never have enjoyed in his lifetime. On the other hand an extremely sophisticated musician like Stravinsky pro­claims his admiration and affection for Tchaikovsky's melodic gifts, his handling of small forms and the strong 'period' flavour of his music. In fact Tchaikovsky's music appeals to two quite different kinds of listeners: to the non-specialist for its all-too-human emotionalism and sense of nostalgia, and to the professional musician for its aristo­cratic elegance and distinctive bouquet

There was already a strain of mental or nervous disease in Tchaikovsky's family - his maternal grandfather, a French emigre named Assier, was described as 'epileptic', though in those days when so little was known of mental illness, this was no doubt a vague, general term. Tchaikovsky himself showed as a child a morbidly acute sensibility, a feverish attachment to his mother in particular and to his family in general and an emotional instability that was already neurotic in character. As he grew up, his attachments were all to members of his own sex; and since homo­sexuality was regarded with horror in the society in which he moved, his life was made even more miserable than that of the ordinary neurotic by acute feelings of guilt and infer­iority, desperate attempts to conceal his real feelings and tragically unsuccessful efforts to lead a normal emotional life.

He was haunted by fear of death and by hallucinations (that his head would fall off, for instance, when he was con­ducting one of his own works), and he attempted suicide when his marriage failed. His only lasting emotional tie with any woman outside his own family was with the widow Nadezhda von Meek, with whom he corresponded for fourteen years≈though he carefully avoided meeting her≈and who made him an allow­ance. On the other hand he frequently became emotionally, and in some cases physically, involved with young pupils or students, and in one case with the singer who played the leading male part in one of his operas. The hopelessness and frustration of these relationships, and the secrecy and de­ception that they involved, took a directly physical toll of Tchaikovsky, who aged very early: when he died at the age of fifty-three he was described as looking like a man of seventy.

This agonising interior life clearly reflected in much of his music, especially his symphonies and two chief operas, Eugene Gnegin and The Queen of Spades was to a great extent concealed behind the conventional facade which the composer took care to elaborate. He was born in comfort­able circumstances, the son of a successful engineer, and he seems never to have seriously questioned the social and political system in which he grew up. When his music brought him success and Nadezhda von Meck's allowance a certain amount of financial ease, he visited Germany, France and Italy and his whole style of living (as can be seen today by visitors to the museum at Klin, which was his country house) was that of a cultivated, cosmopolitan Russian such as we meet in Turgenev's novels. In fact this Turgenev exterior concealing a Dostoevsk y-like interior world of emotional instability and nervous illness gives Tchaikovsky's music its particular charm.

Nineteenth-century Russian culture was still to a very great extent cosmopolitan, continuing the debt to Germany which dated back to the days of Peter the Great and the debt to France first incurred by Catherine II. It was, for instance, quite essential for anyone with pretensions to social ele­gance to speak French fluently and with a good accent, and to have at least a nodding acquaintance with French literature. A knowledge of German was equally important for those studying for the professions or engaged in research; and family holidays in Germany were a commonplace among the wealthier members of the middle class or minor gentry.

This state of affairs was something of a controversial matter. The Slavophil movement, which aimed at mini­mising the influence of western Europe on Russian life and returning as far as possible to the patriarchal patterns of Russian life before Peter the Great, was a form of neo-conservative nationalism and confined entirely to the edu­cated classes. The strong revolutionary element provided by the intelligentsia (significantly enough a word that we have borrowed from the Russian) was almost wholly in favour of the westernisation of Russia, a process that logically in­volved the disappearance of the theocratic monarchy of the Tsars and the Orthodox Church, which was intimately allied to the monarchy. Tchaikovsky, though confessing a purely emotional allegiance to Orthodoxy, was a loyal subject of the Tsar and not seriously concerned with public affairs or intellectual movements.

Tchaikovsky's only important connection with the Slavophil movement was in the field of music, and there he occupied a borderline position. By the St Petersburg com­posers who were grouped round Balakircv (namely, Mussor­gsky, Cui, Rimsky-Korsakovand Borodin),Tchaikovsky was regarded as an arrant westerniser, because he wrote western-style symphonies instead of symphonic poems on Russian themes and did not commit himself to any specific allegiance to Russian folk music. In fact, however, there are countless echoes of Russian folk music all through Tchaikovsky's work: the slow movement of the Violin Concerto and the finales of the Second and Fourth Symphonies are obvious examples.

More important than this, Tchaikovsky's music perfectly reflects the Russian society of his day precisely by reason of its international character. The strains of French ballet music, Italian opera and the German symphony are com­bined with memories of Russian folk music or church music in a way that is not only personal but deeply characteristic of late 19th-century Russia. The Slavophils, and their musical counterparts, the so-called'nationalist'composers of the St. Petersburg school, were attempting to recall or re­create an idealised Russian past, as we see in Mussorgsky's Boris Godunov, Borodin's Prince Igor or Rimsky-Korsakov's Kitezh. Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, gives expression to the superficially cosmopolitan yet deeply Russian society of his own day; and his Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades introduce us to Russian characters belonging if not to Tchaikovsky's own day, yet to only a generation or so earlier. Stravinsky's deep affection for Tchaikovsky's music, and his lack of interest in the Russian 'nationalist' composers, is easily explained by this fact: that with Tchaikovsky he re-enters the world in which he himself grew up, while the nationalists' music belongs either to a museum of the Slavonic past or to that naturalism which Stravinsky regards as a late 19th-century aesthetic aber­ration.

What were Tchaikovsky's greatest gifts as a composer? First of all a rich and extraordinarily original gift of melody. In his great tunes it may be possible to trace French, German or Italian elements. Yet≈even when they have no affinity with Russian folk song≈we feel them at once to be unmistakably Russian. The big D flat melody in his overture Romeo and Juliet, which is one of the great tunes of the world, has a sinuous self-recreating quality that bears the mark of the fine craftsman (as you will find if you try to hum it) yet the emotional immediacy and catchiness of a pop tune. In his ballet music Tchaikovsky could invest the smal­lest fragment of melody with a haunting, evocative quality that makes the listener quite forget the French model which is often in the background.

It is in the ballet music, too, or the ballet-like movements of the symphonies, that we find most clearly Tchaikovsky's second great gift that of colourful instrumentation. There it is delicate and formed of the simplest yet subtlest contrasts and blends, as we find also in the slow movement of the Violin Concerto. In the first and last movements of the symphonies and the finales of the concertos, on the other hand, Tchaikovsky achieves an extraordinarily buoyant and physically exciting brilliance, quite unlike Wagner's and closer in character to that of Berlioz. Although he con­sidered himself deficient in the specifically symphonic art of 'developing' a single idea, yet the cumulative effect of his artfully varied repetitions and quasi-repetitions is un­questionably symphonic. His handling of dance rhythms, which play a large part in his music, reveals a strength of instinctive animal vitality astonishing in a man so tortured nervously. Once again it is perhaps this apparent contradic­tion in Tchaikovsky, like his Turgenev exterior and Dostoevsky interior, that forms part of the fascination that this music exercises over the mid-20th century, an age full of similar contradictions and instinctively attracted both by mental or emotional suffering and by animal vitality.

Tchaikovsky did not think seriously about becoming a professional musician until he was about twenty≈un­usually late for a composer. So a description of his child­hood≈unlike, for instance, Mozart's is not a continuous narrative of musical precocity and early fame. Rather, we have to search among the details of a very ordinary child­hood for the few odd facts and events that, in retrospect, can be seen to have been the seeds of later developments.

He was born on 7th May 1840. His father, llya Petrovich Tchaikovsky, was a mining engineer and at the time was employed by the Government managing a mine at Votkinsk, about 700 miles east of Moscow. He belonged to the upper middle class, and this was an important job, so at the time of Tchaikovsky's birth the family was well-off and socially prominent in the district. They lived in the style of the great landowners in a large house with a large staff; the father was also the commander of a troop of a hundred Cossacks.

His first wife died after bearing him one daughter; in 1833 he married Alexandra Andreyevna Assier, who came from a family of French Huguenot descent. Their first child was Nikolai (born 1838); then came Piotr, the composer (1840); later followed Alexandra (1842), Ippolit (1844) and the twins Anatol and Modest (1850). Modest later produced a three-volume Life and Letters of his composer brother.

Tchaikovsky's father, though fond of music, had no gift for it. His mother sang well, and she had a brother and sister who were noted amateurs. But there are no other traces of music in Tchaikovsky's ancestry, and none of his brothers or sisters shared his inclination for it.

The first signs of anything unusual in Tchaikovsky appeared at the age of four and a half  when a young Frenchwoman called Fanny Durbach joined the family as governess to his six-year-old brother Nikolai. On the very first day Piotr burst into tears and begged to be allowed to join in the lessons. By the time he was six he was fluent if inaccurate, as early poems show: 'To/, oh Russie aime vien! vien!auprede moi. .." in French and German. Years later Mademoiselle Durbach described her young pupil to his brother Modest: 'When we read together none listened so attentively as he did, and when on holidays I gathered my pupils around me in the twilight and let them tell tales in turn, no one could im­provise so well as Piotr. . . . His sensibility was extreme, therefore I had to be very careful how I treated him. A trifle Wounded him deeply. He was brittle as porcelan. With him there could be no question of punishment: the least criticism or reproof, that would pass lightly over other children, would upset him alarmingly.'

Fanny Durbach did not teach music, and so as Modest Tchaikovsky wrote 'the place of music master to the future composer fell to the lot of an inanimate object an orchestrion [musical box] which his father brought back with him after a visit to St Petersburg.' This instrument played melodies by Mozart, Bellini and Donizetti, and it was not long before Tchaikovsky was picking the tunes out on the piano: 'He found such delight in playing that it was fre­quently necessary to drag him by force from the instrument. Afterwards, as the next best substitute, he would take to drumming tunes upon the window-panes. One day, while thus engaged, he was so entirely carried away by this dumb show that he broke the glass and cut his hand severely.'

At the same time it became clear that music had a partic­ularly strong emotional effect on the boy. One day his parents gave a musical party. Tchaikovsky went to bed early, but when Fanny Durbach went to his room she found him sitting up in bed, crying feverishly. She asked him what was the matter and was told: 'Oh this music, this music! Save me from it! It is here, here'≈pointing to his head 'and will not give me any peace.'

When Tchaikovsky was eight, in 1848, his father retired and the family moved to Moscow. Now he was often taken to the opera and was able for the first time to hear an orchestra and to get to know more music than he had heard in the drawing-room at Votkinsk. He also now had piano lessons, at which he made good progress. But≈perhaps as a result of this sudden exposure to music≈a reaction set in in his character. Instead of the cheerful, charming boy he had been he became nervous and irritable. After an attack of measles and a six-month convalescence he recovered to some extent; but it is to this period that much of his later nervous trouble can be traced.

In 1850 Tchaikovsky was sent to the preparatory section of the St Petersburg School of Jurisprudence. Clearly his parents had in mind for him the kind of career that most boys of his class normally followed: after law school he would become a civil servant and remain forever a mere cog in the vast bureaucratic machine of Tsarist Russia. A story related by Modest Tchaikovsky≈relevant because it indicates his strong attachment to his mother and under­lines the importance to him of her subsequent death≈tells how when she left him at the school 'he completely lost his self-control and, clinging wildly to her, refused to let her go.... It became necessary to carry off the poor child by force, and hold him fast until his mother had driven away. Even then he broke loose, and with a cry of despair ran after the carriage, and clung to one of the Wheels, as though he would bring the vehicle to a standstill.'

Two years later the family moved to St Petersburg. In the same year Tchaikovsky passed into the School of Juris­prudence proper. He was to stay there until 1859. 'There is reason to believe,' writes his biographer Edwin Evans, 'that the seeds of his homosexual tendencies were sown at the school.' Two years later the family moved to St Petersburg. In the same year Tchaikovsky passed into the School of Juris­prudence proper. He was to stay there until 1859. 'There is reason to believe,' writes his biographer Edwin Evans, 'that the seeds of his homosexual tendencies were sown at the school.'

Musically, Tchaikovsky's years at the School of Juris­prudence were not eventful. He continued to have private lessons with a succession of teachers; he broadened his acquaintance with the music of others, developing especially a passion for Mozart that lasted all his life surprisingly, perhaps, for there is little musical affinity between the two. Non-musically, the main event of these years took place in 1854 when his mother died of cholera. As we have seen, he was particularly attached to his mother, in characteristically homosexual fashion, and her loss left a deep scar on his sensitive soul. Scholastically, though not a brilliant success he did well enough, and there was still no indication that he would not follow the humdrum career planned for him in the civil service.

Indeed in 1859, when he was nineteen, he left school and entered the Ministry of Justice as a clerk. Again he per­formed his duties adequately if without enthusiasm, becom­ing meanwhile something of a gayyoungman-about-town. Only one incident from his official career≈indicative per­haps of the nervous temperament beneath the bureaucratic surface≈survives. Modest Tchaikovsky relates: 'He had been entrusted with a signed document from the chief of his department, but on his way to deliver it he stopped to talk with someone, and in his absence of mind never noticed that, while talking, he kept tearing off scraps of the paper and chewing them a trick he always had with theatre tickets or programmes. There was nothing for it but to re-copy the document, and, however unpleasant, to face his chief for a fresh signature.'

But underneath, to the disapproval of nearly all his rela­tions, his thoughts were now leading irresistibly towards music. A series of letters to his sister Alexandra (known as Sasha), who had to some extent replaced his mother as his confidante, charts the progress of events: March 1861: They have made me an official, although a poor one; I try as hard as I can to improve and to fulfil my duties more conscientiously, and at the same time I am to be studying thorough-bass!December 1861: / think I have already told you that I have begun to study the theory of music with success. You will agree that, with my rather exceptional talents (I hope you will not mistake this for bragging), it seems foolish not to try my chances in this direction.

September 1862: / have entered [part-time] the newly opened Conservatoire. . . . As you know, I have worked hard at the theory of music during the past year, and have come to the conclusion that sooner or later I shall give up my present occupation for music. Do not imagine that I dream of being a great artist... . I only feel I must do the work for which I have a vocation.

 Finally, April 1863: My musical talent you cannot deny it  is my only one. This being so, it stands to reason that I ought not to leave this God-sent gift uncultivated and undeveloped. For this reason I began to study music seriously. So far my official duties did not clash with this work, and I could remain in the Ministry of Justice. Now, however, my studies grow more severe and take up more time, so I find myself compelled to give up one or the other. . . . In a word, after long consider­ation, I have resolved to sacrifice the salary and resign my post.

So, at the age of twenty-two, Tchaikovsky abandoned his official career and the prosperous if unexciting future that it offered and entered upon a life exclusively devoted to music.