Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker did what no one had attempted, giving dance music the development, the harmonic weight and the psychological interest of a symphony, and they remain the foundation of the classical repertory. Tchaikovsky had trained for the civil service in Saint Petersburg and sat at a clerk's desk in the Ministry of Justice before giving both up for the newly opened Conservatory, where Anton Rubinstein and Nikolai Zaremba taught him from 1862. In 1866 he joined the staff of the new Moscow Conservatory. He wrote in nearly every genre and was equally serious in all of them: six numbered symphonies, three piano concertos, the Violin Concerto, chamber music, more than a hundred songs, ten operas. Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades hold the stage. From 1877 the patronage of Nadezhda von Meck, whom by agreement he never met, freed him to compose, and their correspondence is one of the fullest records we have of a nineteenth-century composer at work. He conducted abroad in his last years, including the opening concerts of Carnegie Hall in 1891, and died in Saint Petersburg in 1893, nine days after conducting the first performance of the Sixth Symphony. Born in Votkinsk in 1840, he graduated from the St Petersburg Conservatory in 1865 with a large silver medal, and it was Nikolai Rubinstein who brought him to Moscow as professor of theory and harmony. His works began to appear in print from 1867 and he wrote reviews for the Moscow press; after years spent in Switzerland and Italy he came home in 1885 and settled near Klin, and in 1892 he was elected to the Académie des Beaux-Arts, with an honorary doctorate from Cambridge the following year.