Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky

Born in 1840, Tchaikovsky was musically precocious but steered toward civil service — Russia had no public music schools and little room for composers. When the Saint Petersburg Conservatory opened, he enrolled and graduated in 1865 with a Western education that set him apart from the nationalist composers of The Five. He spent his career reconciling that formal training with the native Russian musical practices of his childhood, forging a style that was unmistakably his own but never quite satisfied either camp. Personal crises shadowed the work: his mother's early death, a disastrous marriag…