Tchaikovsky's parents, initially supportive, hired a tutor, bought an orchestrion, a form of barrel organ that could imitate elaborate orchestral effects, and encouraged his piano study for both aesthetic and practical reasons.

They had both graduated from institutes in Saint Petersburg and the School of Jurisprudence, which mainly served the lesser nobility, and thought that this education would prepare Tchaikovsky for a career as a civil servant.

[32] Tchaikovsky's early separation from his mother, despite the aforementioned alleged distant relationship, caused emotional trauma that lasted the rest of his life and was intensified by her death from cholera in 1854, when he was 14.

[37] Tchaikovsky also continued his piano studies with Franz Becker, an instrument manufacturer who made occasional visits to the school, but the results, according to musicologist David Brown, were "negligible".

[42] Meanwhile, the Russian Musical Society (RMS) was founded in 1859 by the Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna (a German-born aunt of Tsar Alexander II) and her protégé, pianist and composer Anton Rubinstein.

[44] It hosted a regular season of public concerts (previously held only during the six weeks of Lent when the Imperial Theaters were closed)[45] and provided basic professional training in music.

[75] Between these projects, Tchaikovsky started to compose an opera called Mandragora, to a libretto by Sergei Rachinskii; the only music he completed was a short chorus of Flowers and Insects.

[78] Other works of this period include the Variations on a Rococo Theme for cello and orchestra, the Third and Fourth Symphonies, the ballet Swan Lake, and the opera Eugene Onegin.

[81] During this time, Tchaikovsky's foreign reputation grew and a positive reassessment of his music also took place in Russia, thanks in part to Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky's call for "universal unity" with the West at the unveiling of the Pushkin Monument in Moscow in 1880.

That March, Emperor Alexander III conferred upon him the Order of Saint Vladimir (fourth class), which included a title of hereditary nobility[89] and a personal audience with the Tsar.

In addition, at the instigation of Ivan Vsevolozhsky, Director of the Imperial Theaters and a patron of the composer, Tchaikovsky was awarded a lifetime annual pension of 3,000 rubles from the Tsar.

[90] During this period, Tchaikovsky also began promoting Russian music as a conductor,[90] In January 1887, he substituted, on short notice, at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow for performances of his opera Cherevichki.

[108] Relevant portions of his brother Modest's autobiography, where he tells of the composer's same-sex attraction, have been published, as have letters previously suppressed by Soviet censors in which Tchaikovsky openly writes of it.

[123] In the 1980s in Britain, however, there was academic speculation that he killed himself, either with poison or by contracting cholera intentionally;[124] in the New Grove Dictionary of Music, Roland John Wiley wrote: "the polemics over Tchaikovsky's death have reached an impasse ... .

"[126] Of Tchaikovsky's Western predecessors, Robert Schumann stands out as an influence in formal structure, harmonic practices, and piano writing, according to Brown and musicologist Roland John Wiley.

[129][n 13] The late-Romantic trend for writing orchestral suites, begun by Franz Lachner, Jules Massenet, and Joachim Raff after the rediscovery of Bach's works in that genre, may have influenced Tchaikovsky to try his own hand at them.

[131] So did Léo Delibes' ballets Coppélia and Sylvia for The Sleeping Beauty[n 14] and Georges Bizet's opera Carmen (a work Tchaikovsky admired tremendously) for The Queen of Spades.

[136] Other composers whose work interested Tchaikovsky included Hector Berlioz, Felix Mendelssohn, Giacomo Meyerbeer, Gioachino Rossini,[137] Giuseppe Verdi,[138] Vincenzo Bellini,[139] Carl Maria von Weber[140] and Henry Litolff.

Unlike Western themes, the melodies that Russian composers wrote tended to be self-contained: they functioned with a mindset of stasis and repetition rather than one of progress and ongoing development.

On a technical level, it made modulating to a new key to introduce a contrasting second theme exceedingly difficult, as this was literally a foreign concept that did not exist in Russian music.

They also became a means, found typically in Russian folk music, of simulating movement or progression in large-scale symphonic movements—a "synthetic propulsion", as Brown phrases it, which substituted for the momentum that would be created in strict sonata form by the interaction of melodic or motivic elements.

Tchaikovsky placed blocks of dissimilar tonal and thematic material alongside one another, with what Keller calls "new and violent contrasts" between musical themes, keys, and harmonies.

[160] German musicologist Hermann Kretzschmar credits Tchaikovsky in his later symphonies with offering "full images of life, developed freely, sometimes even dramatically, around psychological contrasts ...

This active engagement with the music "opened for the listener a vista of emotional and psychological tension and an extremity of feeling that possessed relevance because it seemed reminiscent of one's own 'truly lived and felt experience' or one's search for intensity in a deeply personal sense".

[167] Musicologist Martin Cooper calls this practice a subtle form of unifying a piece of music and adds that Tchaikovsky brought it to a high point of refinement.

[185] There might have been a grain of truth in the latter, according to musicologist and conductor Leon Botstein, as German critics especially wrote of the "indeterminacy of [Tchaikovsky's] artistic character ... being truly at home in the non-Russian".

According to Brown and Wiley, the prevailing view of Western critics was that the same qualities in Tchaikovsky's music that appealed to audiences—its strong emotions, directness and eloquence and colorful orchestration—added up to compositional shallowness.

[192] Horowitz maintains that, while the standing of Tchaikovsky's music has fluctuated among critics, for the public, "it never went out of style, and his most popular works have yielded iconic sound-bytes [sic], such as the love theme from Romeo and Juliet".

This, Wiley adds, allowed him the time and freedom to consolidate the Western compositional practices he had learned at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory with Russian folk song and other native musical elements to fulfill his own expressive goals and forge an original, deeply personal style.

He made an impact in not only complete works such as the symphony but also program music and, as Wiley phrases it, "transformed Liszt's and Berlioz's achievements ... into matters of Shakespearean elevation and psychological import".