Pyotr Il’yich Tchaikovsky composed well over 100 romanzas written for voice with piano accompaniment. These songs enjoyed considerable popularity, however they also attracted some criticism. The Russian composer and music critic César Cui, for example, denounced them for failing to

The romanzas of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893), perhaps surprisingly, have not been accorded the high rank bestowed on his ballets and symphonies. The Russian composer César Cui wrote, “Tchaikovsky viewed poetry as a necessary evil that only hindered the process

The First Piano Concerto by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893) is one of the most popular concertos ever written. But it is not a piece for the faint-hearted. It makes huge technical demands on the performer, and because of its dramatic

Two composers we rarely think of together are the very Russian Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) and the very Viennese Mozart (1756–1791). Born fifty years apart, they couldn’t be more different in their style and sensibilities. Mozart had been trained in

In 1888, the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky encapsulated the tragic history of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark, familiar through Shakespeare’s play of the same name, into a fantasy overture. Tchaikovsky had written these kinds of works before, his most famous

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on 7 May 1840 in Votkinsk, a town almost eight hundred miles east of Moscow. Nowadays he is remembered as music’s quintessential Russian Romantic, and a forebear to giants like Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky, and Shostakovich. Today

It’s the fond memory of many adults raised in America that the Christmas season is the time for Tchaikovsky’s beautiful ballet, The Nutcracker. George Balanchine’s New York production, which had its debut on 2 February 1954, brought E.T.A. Hoffman’s tale

Pianist Hans von Bülow was called upon on 25 October 1875 to play the first performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto No. 1 at the Music Hall in Boston. Tchaikovsky wrote to Bülow, “Thank you for the sympathetic attention you have