Was his life full of pathos, or only his Sixth (“Pathétique”) Symphony? In reality, everything started out quite “normally”: the son of a steelwork engineer, he studies law and becomes a civil servant. Only after singing in a private choir and later taking piano lessons, during his period of civil service training, is the adolescent “truly” drawn to music. Surprisingly, it is his unmusical father who recognizes his son’s talent and encourages him to study seriously. But things continue undramatically: after composition studies he initially becomes a music theory teacher. But the deep wellspring within him eventually finds its way to the surface.
Tchaikovsky plays a part in the remarkable awakening of Russian culture - as a contemporary of Dostoyevsky and Tolstoy, and also of the “Mighty Five” that included Mussorgsky and Borodin. For them he is too Western, while in Western Europe he is criticized for his Russian wildness (for example in his Fourth Symphony). He was restless, and thus probably also unstable, often travelling throughout Europe while running away from himself and his home country, paying musical homage to Italy with a Capriccio and the Souvenirs de Florence.
The latter, however, is a very melancholy piece, its somber D minor only giving way to brighter spheres in a “wild” Russian Finale. At times he probably also stood in his own way, like when he once canceled a concert in Vienna with the justification that he was certain to be “insulted.” Perhaps it was not that his life was full of pathos, but that he himself had a vulnerable nature, like one of the characters in a Dosteyevsky novel?
© Johannes Leopold Mayer, ORF - Radio Österreich 1