Tchaikovsky's father was a successful mining engineer while his mother was the artistic, sensitive one, French by birth, and a good linguist. Pyotr was the second of her six children. He had a good ...

However, he was initially educated for a career in the civil service, and his first job was as an assistant in the Ministry of Justice. Tchaikovsky then enrolled in the Saint Petersburg Conservatory ...

A few days ago, I was riffling through the more obscure volumes on Tchaikovsky held by Cambridge University and, when the dust settled, I found a highly instructive story about the Fifth Symphony. It ...

Pyotr Tchaikovsky was a giant of 19th century classical music. His style echoed the Westernizer-Slavophile divide among Russia’s intelligentsia, and indeed the Russian Empire as a whole, as he tried ...

A new book claims that the Russian composer is not the tormented genius he is portrayed as, but a fun-loving man with ‘a fabulous life’ Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky has long been portrayed as a ...

Their 13-year exchange of 2,600 letters reveals a rare bond of artistic devotion, distance and selfless support.

Anybody with a child who has ever studied ballet is inevitably in a close, intimate relationship with Tchaikovsky – born on 7 May 1840. Maybe too close. Inevitably this connection centres on the music ...

You'd think Russia would welcome plans to produce the country's first major film about Pyotr Tchaikovsky. But Kirill Serebrennikov, a prominent Russian filmmaker, has said he's given up securing ...

Vladimir Putin has weighed in on the sexuality of composer Pyotr Tchaikovsky, which is only in dispute because Russia has become increasingly homophobic, unwilling to admit that some of its greatest ...