Because of its opportunities for soul expansion, music has ever attracted the strong, free sons of the earth. The most profound truths, the most blasphemous things, the most terrible ideas, may be incorporated within the walls of a symphony, and the police be none the wiser. Supposing that some Russian professional supervisor of artistic anarchy really knew what arrant doctrines Tchaikovsky preached! It is its freedom from the meddlesome hand of the censor that makes of music a playground for great brave souls. –James Gibbons Huneker.

If any one composer can be said to encapsulate the essence of Russianness, it is Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893), and yet he was the one major composer of 19th century Russia who cannot be bound to the Russian nationalist school. Tchaikovsky paid heavily for his determination to be true to himself above all else; few major artists have ever suffered the sort of critical savaging that was meted out to him, which seems in striking contrast to his welcome role in today’s concert halls.
Tchaikovsky was born in the provincial town of Votkinsk, where his father was a mining engineer. His formal tuition began at home, and included piano and music theory lessons. In 1848, the family moved to St. Petersburg, and in 1850 Pyotr was sent to a boarding school in the city. After extensive law studies, he found employment at the Ministry of Justice. At 22, he left law and entered the city music conservatory to study with Anton Rubinstein, a composer and stupendous pianist. In 1866, he went to Moscow, where Rubinstein’s brother Nikolai appointed Tchaikovsky professor of harmony at the conservatory. He was temporarily swept up in the wave of nationalism, particularly after meeting Rimsky-Korsakov, but soon returned to his cosmopolitan instincts.
1877 was the most crucial year in Tchaikovsky’s life. He met Nadezhda von Meck, a wealthy widow who, impressed by some of his early music, now commissioned him to produce some violin and piano arrangements of his more recent works. The relationship would last fourteen years and bring many commissions, though they never actually met. Tchaikovsky also met Antonina Milyukova, who in May 1877 started sending Tchaikovsky infatuated love letters in which she threatened to take her life unless he responded. Initially cautious, Tchaikovsky eventually saw his unstable admirer as a solution to his private homosexuality. Within seven weeks of meeting her, and unbeknown to most of his family, the two were married. The marriage was (not surprisingly) a disaster, with the couple separating in a few weeks and Tchaikovsky sinking into an overwhelming depression.
By the 1880s, Tchaikovsky’s music was being played as far away as the United States. After a period of isolation and prolific composition, Tchaikovsky moved to Moscow to take up a second successful career as a conductor. (On an incredibly successful visit to the United States in 1891, Tchaikovsky conducted the opening night at what was to become Carnegie Hall.)
The circumstances of Tchaikovsky’s death remain controversial to this day. The official version was that he had died from cholera after drinking unboiled water, but in the 1970s a Russian scholar produced a new account of Tchaikovsky’s last days that established suicide as the cause of death. Shortly before his death, Tchaikovsky had been caught in flagrante with a nephew of a high-ranking official. Tchaikovsky’s law-school colleagues, determined to avert a scandal that would reflect badly on them, summoned Tchaikovsky before a “court of honor” on October 31 and ordered him to commit suicide. Two days later, he took arsenic.
Whereas composers like Brahms used the orchestral suite as a form to prepare for writing symphonies, Tchaikovsky saw the suite as a welcome respite from the rigors of symphonic form. “I want to compose a suite so that I may have a good rest from symphonic music,” he wrote to his brother Modest in 1878. Thus, Tchaikovsky’s Suite No. 1 in D Minor, op. 43 was composed between his Fourth and Fifth Symphonies and is a remarkably mature work. The piece began its life with five movements, but Tchaikovsky realized that all the movements were in duple time, so he added the divertimento in triple meter. Despite breaking from sonata-allegro form, he opens with a powerful introduction and fugue—hardly a “vacation” from symphonic composition—but settles more into his element in the succeeding movements. The divertimento follows, feeling rather like a waltz and giving way to the intermezzo, which was originally entitled “Echo du bal” and has a graceful Slavic character. The “March Miniature” is the most famous movement of the suite, originally entitled “March of the Lilliputians.” The scherzo was actually composed first and was the inspiration for the rest of the suite, while the final gavotte ends the suite in a decidedly upbeat fashion, laying the groundwork for Prokofiev’s gavotte in his Classical Symphony.