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 marriage to Antonina Miliukova, the collapse of his 13-year patronage from Nadezhda von Meck, and the death of his friend Nikolai Rubinstein. He kept his homosexuality private; his dedication of the Sixth Symphony to his nephew Vladimir Davydov has been read as evidence of romantic attachment. Tchaikovsky died suddenly in 1893 at 53, officially of cholera, though debate persists about the circumstances.