Ebook: Great Masters: Tchaikovsky - His Life and Music

The life of Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–1893) exhibits as close a link as you will find anywhere between an artist's inner world and the outward products of that artist's creative activity. As a man, Tchaikovsky was defined by and indivisible from his music, which became an outlet for all the shifting moods of his turbulent soul. As Professor Robert Greenberg says, "If Tchaikovsky felt it, it found a way into his music."

As an artist—and it is worth recalling that he was the first full-time, formally trained, professional composer in Russian history—Tchaikovsky walked a fine and difficult line between his Romantic penchant for expression and the demands of Classical structure.

This delicate balancing act—between heart and head, emotion and reason, release and control, Russian expressive content and German technique—is a key to his music that you find amply illustrated by Professor Greenberg's musical selections and commentary.

Course Lecture Titles
1. Introduction and Early Life
2. A Career in Music
3. The First Masterworks
4. Maturity
5. Three WomenTatyana, Antonina, and Nadezhda
6. My Great Friend
7. A Free Man
8. The Last Years, or Don't Drink the Water