Tchaikovsky

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, born in Votkinsk in 1840, was the Russian Romantic who blew the doors off the concert hall long before anybody plugged in an amplifier. He was the first Russian composer whose music really stuck abroad, and the hits still come thick and fast: the 1812 Overture, the First Piano Concerto, the Violin Concerto, Romeo and Juliet, the opera Eugene Onegin and the ballets Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker.

He got there the long way. Groomed for a career as a civil servant in a country with no real system for training musicians, he jumped at the new Saint Petersburg Conservatory when it opened its doors and graduated in 1865. That Western-leaning schooling set him apart from the nationalist composers known as The Five, and critics at home and abroad argued for years over whether his music was too Russian or not Russian enough.

Behind the grand, sweeping melodies was a life shadowed by depression and personal crises, and he died suddenly in 1893 at 53, an end usually put down to cholera, though the cause is still debated. The finale of the 1812 Overture is the part that has crashed its way onto rock radio countdowns, and it's easy to hear why: few pieces of music hit harder.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.