Piotr Illick Tchaikovsky
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It really pisses me off.
~Peter Illick Tchaikovsky on music
Petey-o Illick Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) was a Russian composer, dentist, and a woman trapped in a man's body. He had a beard and probably a first name as well. He composed six very serious symphonies which took him a lot of effort. However, the fact that he is today mostly remembered for his stupid, childish nonsense-ballets really pisses him off.
Childhood and early manhood Pyotr Tchaikovsky was born on April 25, 1840 (Julian calendar) or May 7 (Gregorian calendar) in Votkinsk, a small town in present-day Udmurtia (at the time the Vyatka Guberniya of Imperial Russia). He was the son of a mining engineer in the government mines and the second of his three wives, Alexandra, a Russian woman of French ancestry. He was the older brother (by some ten years) of the dramatist, librettist, and translator Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
Musically precocious, Pyotr began piano lessons at age five with a local woman, Mariya Palchikova, and within three years could read music as well as his teacher. In 1850, his father was appointed director of the St Petersburg Technological Institute. There, the young Tchaikovsky obtained an education at the School of Jurisprudence. Though music was not considered a high priority on the curriculum, Tchaikovsky was taken with classmates on regular visits to the theater and the opera. He was very taken with the works of Rossini, Bellini, Verdi and Mozart. The only music instruction he received at school was some piano tuition from Franz Becker, a piano manufacturer who made occasional visits as a token music teacher.
Tchaikovsky as bureaucrat.Tchaikovsky's mother died of cholera in 1854. The 14-year-old Tchaikovsky took the news hard; for two years, he could not write about his loss. He reacted by turning to music. Within a month of her death, he was making his first serious efforts at composition, a waltz in her memory.
Tchaikovsky's father indulged his interest in music, funding studies with Rudolph Kündinger, a well-known piano teacher from Nuremberg, beginning in 1855. But when Tchaikovsky's father consulted Kündinger about prospects for a musical career for his son, Kündinger wrote that nothing suggested a potential composer or even a fine performer. Tchaikovsky was told to finish his course work, then try for a post in the Ministry of Justice.
Tchaikovsky graduated on May 25, 1859 with the rank of titular counselor, the lowest rung of the civil service ladder. On June 15, he was appointed to the Ministry of Justice. Six months later the Ministry made him a junior assistant to his department and a senior assistant two months after that, where he remained.
In 1861, Tchaikovsky learned of music classes being held by the Russian Musical Society (RMS) by accident. According to Tchaikovsky's friend Nikolay Kashkin, Tchaikovsky enjoyed a friendly rivalry with a music-loving cousin, an officer in the Horse Grenadiers. This cousin boasted one day that he could make the transition from one key to any other in no more than three chords. Tchaikovsky took up this challenge and lost, then learned his cousin had learned it from Nikolai Zaremba's RMS class in music theory.
Tchaikovsky promptly began studies with Zaremba. The following year, when Zaremba joined the faculty of the new St Petersburg Conservatory, Tchaikovsky followed his teacher and enrolled, but still did not give up his post at the ministry, until his father consented to support him. From 1862 to 1865, Tchaikovsky studied harmony, counterpoint and fugue with Zaremba, and instrumentation and composition under the director and founder of the Conservatory, Anton Rubinstein, who was impressed by Tchaikovsky's talent.
After graduating, Tchaikovsky was approached by Anton Rubinstein's younger brother Nikolai to become professor of harmony, composition, and the history of music. Tchaikovsky gladly accepted the position, as his father had retired and lost his property.
[edit] Works
Tchaikovsky composed six symphonies, the sixth of which is the most famous nowadays. He also composed numerous orchestral overtures and fantasies, including the 1812 Overture. Composed in 1876, it was to be called the 1871 Overture (Supposedly commemorating the beginning of the Franco-Prussian War) but Tchaikovsky had forgotten what year it started in, besides it being a current event. Tchaikovsky loved this piece because he wrote an actual cannon into the score. The cannon was designed to fire into the audience near the end of the piece, causing bodies to fly all around the concert hall in a bloody mess. This pleased Tchaikovsky greatly. The thing that really irks Tchaikovsky is that he is nowadays most famous for his idiotic ballets, set in environments where toys move on their own, mice form armies and a little girl is happy when she receives a nutcracker for Christmas. "I mean, who believes all that crud?" Tchaikovsky asked himself in a recent interview. "Especially the 'Sugar Plum Fairy' really makes me mad. What was I thinking when I wrote it?" whined the composer in agony.
However, the public still loves Tchaikovsky's rather stupid ballets, such as The Nutwhacker: In Which A Toy Becomes Human and Decides That Being a Toy is a Much Better Use of His Time, The Sleeping Beauteous Young Lady Who May Only Be Awakened by a Kiss, and Swan Lake III: Return of the Jedi.
Tchaikovsky, rather bitterly disillusioned with his career as a dentist, is also credited with inventing several extremely painful appliances and gadgets still used by dentists such as the Pain-O-Matic (usually disguised by another more technical sounding name) which accomplishes nothing, but convinces the patient that something must be being fixed by this ridiculous contraption.
Tchaikovsky was a paper eater and failed as a civil servant because he became so nervous so ate his first report. Fortunately, he was able to fall back on his second skill, writing music, which was often a troubling proposition as he could not write his music down on paper without eating it. Fortunately, musicians were able to whisk his music scores away from him often enough that his works were performed in public. Tchaikovsky will best be known as the Great Uncle (actually, with modesty, Good Uncle) to humor writer Leon Tchaikovsky who fortunately writes on the Internet and is often hospitalized for attempting to eat his computer.
Tchaikovsky wrote several works well known among the general classical public—Romeo and Juliet, the 1812 Overture and Marche Slave. These, along with two of his concertos and three of his latter symphonies, are probably his most familiar works, thanks in part to Tchaikovsky's considerable gift for melody, along with the emotional accessibility of his music.
Original cast of Tchaikovsky's ballet, The Sleeping Beauty, St Petersburg, 1890Tchaikovsky is well known for his ballets, although it was only in his last years, with his last two ballets, that his contemporaries came to really appreciate his finer qualities as ballet music composer. His final ballet, The Nutcracker, has become among the most popular ballets performed, primarily around Christmas time. He also completed ten operas, although one of these is mostly lost and another exists in two significantly different versions. In the West his most famous operas are Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades.
Tchaikovsky's earlier symphonies are generally optimistic works of nationalistic character. The later symphonies are more intensely dramatic, with the Fourth a breakthrough work; there Tchaikovsky found the symphonic method that matched his temperament to his talents. The most famous of these, the Sixth, is especially interpreted by many as a declaration of despair. These two symphonies, along with the Fifth, are recognized as highly original examples of symphonic form and are frequently performed.
In the ten years between the Fourth and Fifth Symphonies, Tchaikovsky also wrote four orchestral suites. He originally intended to designate the Third Suite a symphony - but, as he told Taneyev, "... the title is of no importance".[8] Tchaikovsky used the suites to experiment with new instrumental combinations.
Among Tchaikovsky's concertos, his First Piano Concerto is now the best known and among the most frequently played piano concerti. It is also known by the name "Death Concerto" because of the crazy strength and unhuman handspan needed to play the piece, that often kills people who foolishly attempt to play it. Other nicknames include "Tendonitis Concerto" and "The Famous One". However, somehow the piece became uber famous nonetheless. The same holds true for his Violin Concerto, but he wrote two other works for piano and orchestra and left another unfinished at his death. In addition, Tchaikovsky composed two concertante works for cello and orchestra — the Variations on a Rococo theme and Pezzo capriccioso.
[edit] The City
Although the Russian composer Tchaikovsky is well known, not many people know that he was named after the capital city of Thailand. About 2 in 4,134.45 people know that Tchaikovsky is a city - even less in Tchaikovsky itself!
Tchaikovsky's population is about 32 and a half, but nobody knows for sure as it is mainly inhabited by small shelled creatures know as snayles (thought to be exstinct throughout the rest of the world) who have enslaved all human life in the city centre.
Tchaikovsky's native language is Tchaikovskish - a mixture of Cockney and gibberish (Cockney is often thought to be gibberish anyway - just ask the rest of England) that sounds like a londoner screaming. It is believed by most that the original inhabitants watched far too much Eastenders.
[edit] Incantations
Tchaikovsky was also a part of the internationally feared composing monster known only as Tchaikostakovichaninoff.
He ravaged countries with his heavily romantic symphonies, which usually feature violins playing in octaves, cellos playing pizzicato until their fingers bleed, actual parts for bass and tuba, dissonance that could make a tritone sound like a perfect fifth and brass parts that make people to defecate upon listening to them. The monster attacked Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the height of World War II and was also the real reason for global warming and the crisis in Darfur. Some also speculate that it was the cause behind such disasters as the Hindenburg incident, the sinking of the titanic, as well as the reason George W. Bush was allowed into office in 2000. His evil has no end on this earth. His main opponent was Van Bachändelthoven, the German bastard who wrote 50 minute piano sonatas that repeated the same 8 measures over 500 times at the least and followed natural succession until listeners decided to gouge their eyes out with rusty utensils. They would also often have the ending cadence of the chords ii6 V I7add4dim9sus1200, a chord as monstrous as the trio itself, as well as the one and only chord John Petrucci of Dream Theater has been known to play in his entire lifetime.
| Drunk Russian Composers |
| Modest Mussorgsky | Sergei Prokofiev | Sergei Rachmaninov | Rimsky-Korsakov | Dmitri Shostakovich | Igor Stravinsky | Pyotr Tchaikovsky |
