Tchaikovsky was headed for a safe career in the imperial civil service until, at twenty-two, he abandoned his desk for the brand-new St Petersburg Conservatory. Russia's musical establishment never quite forgave him for being too European, and Europe's for being too Russian; audiences, then and now, have simply heard the most direct melodic gift of the nineteenth century.
His life ran on extremes, a catastrophic marriage lasting weeks; a fourteen-year correspondence with the widow Nadezhda von Meck, who bankrolled him on condition they never meet; wandering years in which some of his most Russian music was written in Italian hotel rooms, including the sextet he sketched in Florence. Out of it came the three great ballets, six symphonies, the operas and concertos that made him the first Russian composer the whole world knew.
He conducted the premiere of his Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique, in October 1893, and was dead nine days later at fifty-three. The music's mixture of splendour and raw confession has never dated for a single season since.
