A patron supported him for fourteen years and they exchanged more than twelve hundred letters, on the standing agreement that they would never meet.
Tchaikovsky was born in 1840 in a mining town in the Urals, where his father managed the works. At ten he was sent to a boarding school of jurisprudence in Saint Petersburg, and afterwards took a clerk's post in the Ministry of Justice — nothing in his first twenty-one years suggested a composer. When the Saint Petersburg Conservatory opened in 1862 he enrolled in evening classes, and the next year he resigned his post and traded his salary for teaching and copying work.
Two things pulled at him all his life. One was whether to be a Russian composer: the musical world there had split between those who wanted music grown from folk song and those who wanted German training, and since he stood entirely with neither, both criticised him. The other was his private life. In 1877, under great pressure, he married a student; the marriage lasted a few weeks, and he left Moscow for months before he recovered.
That same year Nadezhda von Meck, the widow of a railway magnate, began supporting him with a fixed sum each year so that he could simply write. They exchanged more than twelve hundred letters over fourteen years and never formally met — her condition, which he kept. In 1890 she stopped the payments without explaining why, and it wounded him badly.
He died in 1893, nine days after the premiere of the Sixth Symphony, at fifty-three. Cholera was given as the cause at the time; the question has been argued over ever since and there is no settled answer.
In Tchaikovsky the tune is plainly the lead — whatever the harmony does underneath, there is always a singable line on top, and it often climbs and then sighs its way back down. That rise-and-fall shape is his signature.
The second mark is how he says the same thing more sadly each time. When a melody returns it is usually scored thicker, or lower, or turned to the minor; not faster or louder, but heavier.
The third is the bones of dance. He wrote three ballets, and that clear beat-by-beat motion seeps into most of his music; even his lyrical miniatures usually have a steady pulse holding them up.
His piano pieces are by the same man as his symphonies — the orchestra's layers folded into two hands, with the melody still on top.
