8 things you don’t know about Tchaikovsky

theyushinist:

You know the Swan Lake, and you know the Nutcracker. What you don’t know about Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is:

1. He never got over his mother’s death from cholera, referring to it as “the crucial event” until the end of his life.

2. He was a public servant for a living.

3. He found comfort in Nadezhda von Meck, a widow who became his patroness for 13 years.

4. He was homosexual, hiding it from the austere Tsar regime. He was in a relationship with musician Iosif Kotek. (photo)

5. Désirée Artôt was the only woman he really loved; maybe because she left him right before marriage for a Spanish baritone.

6. His comment on his  marriage to Antonina Miliukova, another former student, was that… “That man who in May took it into his head to marry Antonina Ivanovna, who during June wrote a whole opera as though nothing had happened, who in July married, who in September fled from his wife, who in November railed at Rome and so on—that man wasn’t I, but another Pyotr Ilyich.”

7. He died at the age of 53 from cholera; or not. Many say it was suicide. Nobody really knows.

8. The day he died was November 6, 1893.

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