Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (Russian: Пётр Ильич Чайковский; often Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky in English; May 7, 1840 [O.S. April 25] – November 6, 1893 [O.S. October 25]) was a Russian composer of the Romantic era. His wide ranging output includes symphonies, operas, ballets, instrumental and chamber music and songs. He wrote some of the most popular concert and theatrical music in the classical repertoire, including the ballets Swan Lake, The Sleeping Beauty and The Nutcracker, the 1812 Overture, his First Piano Concerto, his last three numbered symphonies, and the opera Eugene Onegin.

Born into a middle-class family, Tchaikovsky was educated for a career as a civil servant, despite his obvious musical precocity. He pursued a musical career against the wishes of his family, entering the Saint Petersburg Conservatory in 1862 and graduating in 1865. This formal, Western oriented training set him apart from the contemporary nationalistic movement embodied by the influential group of young Russian composers known as The Five, with whom Tchaikovsky's professional relationship was mixed. Although he enjoyed many popular successes, Tchaikovsky was never emotionally secure, and his life was punctuated by personal crises and periods of depression. Contributory factors were his suppressed homosexuality and fear of exposure, his disastrous marriage, and the sudden collapse of the one enduring relationship of his adult life, his 13-year association with the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck. Amid private turmoil Tchaikovsky's public reputation grew; he was honored by the Tsar, awarded a lifetime pension and lauded in the concert halls of the world. His sudden death at the age of 53 is generally ascribed to cholera, but some attribute it to suicide. Although perennially popular with concert audiences across the world, Tchaikovsky's music was often dismissed by critics in the early and mid 20th century as being vulgar and lacking in elevated thought. By the end of the 20th century, however, Tchaikovsky's status as a significant composer was generally regarded as secure.

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born in Votkinsk, a small town in present day Udmurtia, formerly province of Vyatka in the Russian Empire, to a family with a long line of military service. Ilya Petrovich Tchaikovsky, his father, was an engineer who served as a lieutenant colonel in the Department of Mines and manager of the famed Kamsko-Votkinsk Ironworks. The composer's mother, Alexandra Andreyevna née d'Assier, 18 years her husband's junior, was of partial French ancestry, and was the second of Ilya's three wives. Tchaikovsky had four brothers (Nikolai, Ippolit, and twins Anatoly and Modest), and a sister, Alexandra. He also had a half-sister Zinaida from his father's first marriage. Tchaikovsky was particularly close to Alexandra and the twins. Anatoly later established a prominent legal career, while Modest became a dramatist, librettist, and translator. Alexandra married Lev Davydov and had seven children, one of whom, "Bob", "[became] a central figure in the composer's final years". The Davydovs provided the only real family life Tchaikovsky knew as an adult, and their estate in Kamenka, Ukraine, became a welcome refuge for him during his years of wandering.

In 1843, due to the growth in family responsibilities, Tchaikovsky's parents hired a French governess, Fanny Dürbach, a 22 year old experienced teacher who, Modest later wrote, "knew both French and German equally well, and whose morals were strictly Protestant". While Dürbach had been hired to look after Tchaikovsky's elder brother Nikolai and a Tchaikovsky niece, it was not long before Tchaikovsky became curious about the young woman and, as biographer Anthony Holden wrote, "wormed his way into Fanny Dürbach's affections, and thus into her classes". Dürbach's love and affection for her charge is said to have provided a counter to Tchaikovsky's mother, who is described by Holden as a cold, unhappy, distant parent not given to displays of physical affection. However, Tchaikovsky scholar Alexander Poznansky wrote that the mother doted on her son.

Tchaikovsky began piano lessons at the age of five. A precocious pupil, he could read music as adeptly as his teacher within three years. His parents were initially supportive of his musical talents, hiring a tutor, buying an orchestrion (a form of barrel organ that could imitate elaborate orchestral effects), and encouraging his study of the piano. However, his parents' passion for his musical talent soon cooled, and, in 1850, the family decided to send Tchaikovsky to the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in Saint Petersburg. The school mainly served the lesser nobility, and would prepare him for a career as a civil servant. As the minimum age for acceptance was 12, Tchaikovsky was required to spend two years boarding at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence's preparatory school, 800 miles (1,300 km) from his family. Once those two years had passed, Tchaikovsky transferred to the Imperial School of Jurisprudence to begin a seven-year course of studies.

On June 25, 1854 Tchaikovsky suffered the shock of his mother's death from cholera. Tchaikovsky authority David Brown calls it "the crucial event of [Tchaikovsky's] years at the School of Jurisprudence", and noted that "it was certainly shattering." Tchaikovsky bemoaned the loss of his mother for the rest of his life, and admitted that it had "a huge influence on the way things turned out for me." He was so affected that he was unable to inform Fanny Dürbach until two years after the fact. At the age of 40, approximately 26 years after his mother's death, Tchaikovsky wrote to his patroness, Nadezhda von Meck, "Every moment of that appalling day is as vivid to me as though it were yesterday." However, within a month of his mother's death he was making his first serious efforts at composition, a waltz in her memory. Tchaikovsky's father, who also became sick with cholera at this time but made a full recovery, immediately sent the boy back to school in hope that the classwork would occupy his mind. To make up for his sense of isolation and to compensate for the loss in his family, Tchaikovsky formed important friendships with fellow students, such as those with Aleksey Apukhtin and Vladimir Gerard, which lasted the rest of his life. He may have also been exposed to the allegedly widespread homosexual practices at the school. Whether these were formative experiences or practices toward which the composer would have gravitated normally, biographers agree that he may have discovered his sexual orientation at this time.

Music was not considered a high priority at the School of Jurisprudence, but Tchaikovsky maintained a connection to music extracurricularly, by regularly attending the theater and the opera with other students. At this time, he was fond of works by Rossini, Bellini, Verdi and Mozart. He was known to sit at the school's harmonium after choir practice and improvise on whatever themes had just been sung. "We were amused," Vladimir Gerard later remembered, "but not imbued with any expectations of his future glory." Piano manufacturer Franz Becker made occasional visits to the school as a token music teacher. This was the only formal music instruction Tchaikovsky received there. In 1855, Ilya Tchaikovsky funded private lessons with Rudolph Kündinger, a well-known piano teacher from Nuremberg. Ilya also questioned Kündinger about a musical career for his son. Kündinger replied that while he was impressed with Tchaikovsky's ability to improvise at the keyboard, nothing suggested a potential composer or even a fine performer. Tchaikovsky was told to finish his course and then try for a post in the Ministry of Justice.

On June 10, 1859, at the age of 19, Tchaikovsky graduated from the School of Jurisprudence with the rank of titular counsellor, a low rank on the civil service ladder. On June 15, he was appointed to the Ministry of Justice. Six months later he became a junior assistant and two months after that, a senior assistant, where he remained for the rest of his three-year civil service career.

In 1861, Tchaikovsky attended classes in music theory organized by the Russian Musical Society (RMS) and taught by Nikolai Zaremba. A year later he followed Zaremba to the new Saint Petersburg Conservatory. Tchaikovsky decided not to give up his Ministry post "until I am quite certain that I am destined to be a musician rather than a civil servant." From 1862 to 1865 he studied harmony and counterpoint with Zaremba, while Anton Rubinstein, director and founder of the Conservatory, taught him instrumentation and composition. In 1863, Tchaikovsky abandoned his civil service career and began studying music full-time, graduating from the Conservatory in December 1865. Though Rubinstein was impressed by Tchaikovsky's musical talent, he and Zaremba later clashed with the young composer over his First Symphony, written after his graduation, when he submitted it to them for their perusal. The symphony was given its first complete performance in Moscow in February 1868, where it was well received.

Rubinstein's Western musical orientation brought him into opposition with the nationalistic group of musicians known as The Five. As Tchaikovsky was Rubinstein's best-known pupil, he became a target for the group, especially for César Cui. Cui's criticisms began with a blistering review of a cantata Tchaikovsky had written as his graduation exercise from the Conservatory. Calling the piece "feeble", Cui wrote that if Tchaikovsky had any gift for music, "then at least somewhere or other [the cantata] would have broken through the fetters of the Conservatoire". The effect of this review on Tchaikovsky was devastating: "My vision grew dark, my head spun, and I ran out of the café like a madman.... All day I wandered aimlessly through the city, repeating, 'I'm sterile, insignificant, nothing will come out of me, I'm ungifted'".

When in 1867, Rubinstein resigned as conductor from Saint Petersburg's Russian Musical Society orchestra, he was replaced by composer Mily Balakirev, leader of The Five. Tchaikovsky, now Professor of Music Theory at the Moscow Conservatory, had already promised his Dances of the Hay Maidens (which he later included in his opera The Voyevoda, as Characteristic Dances) to the society. In submitting the manuscript (and perhaps mindful of Cui's review of the graduation cantata), Tchaikovsky included a note to Balakirev that ended with a request for a word of encouragement should the Dances not be performed. Possibly sensing a new disciple in Tchaikovsky, Balakirev wrote "with complete frankness" in his reply that he felt that Tchaikovsky was "a fully fledged artist". These letters set the tone for Tchaikovsky's relationship with Balakirev over the next two years. In 1869, the two entered into a working relationship, the result being Tchaikovsky's first recognised masterpiece, the fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet, a work which The Five wholeheartedly embraced.

Though, personally, Tchaikovsky remained on friendly terms with most of The Five, professionally, he was usually ambivalent about their music. Despite the collaboration with Balakirev on the Romeo and Juliet fantasy-overture, Tchaikovsky made considerable efforts to ensure his musical independence from the group as well as from the conservative faction at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory.

From 1867 to 1878, Tchaikovsky combined his professorial duties with music criticism while continuing to compose. Some of his best known works from this period include the First Piano Concerto, the Variations on a Rococo Theme for violoncello and orchestra, the Little Russian and Fourth Symphonies, the ballet Swan Lake and the opera Eugene Onegin. The First Piano Concerto suffered an initial rejection by its intended dedicatee, Anton Rubinstein's brother Nikolai, though he eventually championed the work. The work was subsequently premiered in Boston in October 1875, played by Hans von Bülow, whose pianism had impressed Tchaikovsky during an appearance in Moscow in March 1874.

In Moscow, teaching with Nikolai Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky gained his first taste of famed appreciation. Introduced into the Artistic Circle, a club founded by Rubinstein, Tchaikovsky enjoyed a sense of social celebrity status among friends and fellow artists. However, over a five year period, Tchaikovsky became frustrated with teaching and found himself struggling financially. He gradually moved away from Rubinstein, to maintain his independence from Rubinstein's renowned reputation. Nevertheless, while the move to Moscow was bittersweet, filled with friendship, jealousy, and inner struggles, it was successful from a professional point of view. Tchaikovsky's musical works were frequently performed, with few delays between their composition and first performances, and the publication (after 1867) of songs and piano music for the home market helped bolster the composer's popularity.

In his book, Tchaikovsky: The Quest for the Inner Man, Poznansky showed that Tchaikovsky had homosexual tendencies and that some of the composer's closest relationships were with persons of the same sex. Tchaikovsky's servant Aleksei Sofronov and the composer's nephew, Vladimir "Bob" Davydov, have been speculated as possible romantic interests. Tchaikovsky dedicated his Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique, to Davydov. The love theme from Romeo and Juliet is generally considered to have been inspired by Eduard Zak.

More controversial than Tchaikovsky's reported sexual proclivities is how comfortable the composer might have been with his sexual nature. After reading all Tchaikovsky's letters (including unpublished ones), Poznansky concludes that the composer "eventually came to see his sexual peculiarities as an insurmountable and even natural part of his personality ... without experiencing any serious psychological damage." Relevant portions of his brother Modest's autobiography, where he tells of his brother's sexual orientation, have also been published. Modest, like Tchaikovsky, was homosexual. Some letters previously suppressed by Soviet censors, where Tchaikovsky openly speaks out about his homosexuality, have been published in Russian, as well as by Poznansky in English translation. However, biographer Anthony Holden claims British musicologist and scholar Henry Zajaczkowski's research "along psychoanalytical lines" points instead to "a severe unconscious inhibition by the composer of his sexual feelings":

One consequence of it may be sexual overindulgence as a kind of false solution: the individual thereby persuades himself that he does accept his sexual impulses. Complementing this and, also, as a psychological defense mechanism, would be precisely the idolization by Tchaikovsky of many of the young men of his circle [the self-styled "Fourth Suite"], to which Poznansky himself draws attention. If the composer's response to possible sexual objects was either to use and discard them or to idolize them, it shows that he was unable to form an integrated, secure relationship with another man. That, surely, was [Tchaikovsky's] tragedy.

Musicologist and historian Roland John Wiley suggests a third alternative, based on Tchaikovsky's letters. He suggests that while Tchaikovsky experienced "no unbearable guilt" over his homosexuality, he remained aware of the negative consequences of that knowledge becoming public, especially of the ramifications for his family. His decision to enter into a heterosexual union and try to lead a double life was prompted by several factors — the possibility of exposure, the willingness to please his father, his own desire for a permanent home and his love of children and family. While Tchaikovsky may have been romantically active, the evidence for "sexual argot and passionate encounter" is limited. He sought out the company of homosexuals in his circle for extended periods, "associating openly and establishing professional connections with them." Wiley adds, "Amateurish criticism to the contrary, there is no warrant to assume, this period [of his short lived marriage] excepted, that Tchaikovsky's sexuality ever deeply impaired his inspiration, or made his music idiosyncratically confessional or incapable of philosophical utterance." Professor Robert Greenberg of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music agrees, describes his turn towards a troubled inner world where he, “found a world of self-expression that he might never have discovered had he felt less alienated from society.”

In 1868, at the age of 28, Tchaikovsky met the Belgian soprano Désirée Artôt, then on a tour of Russia. They became infatuated, and were engaged to be married. He dedicated his Romance in F minor for piano, Op. 5, to her. However, on September 15, 1869, without any communication with Tchaikovsky, Artôt married a member of her company, the Spanish baritone Mariano Padilla y Ramos. The general view has been that Tchaikovsky got over the affair fairly quickly. It has, however, been postulated that he coded her name into the Piano Concerto No. 1 in B-flat minor and the tone-poem Fatum. They met on a handful of later occasions, and in October 1888 he wrote Six French Songs, Op. 65, for her, in response to her request for a single song. Tchaikovsky later claimed she was the only woman he ever loved.

In April 1877 Tchaikovsky's favorite pupil, Vladimir Shilovsky, married suddenly. Shilovsky's wedding may in turn have spurred Tchaikovsky to consider such a step himself. He declared his intention to marry in a letter to his brother. There followed Tchaikovsky's ill-starred marriage to one of his former composition students, Antonina Miliukova. The brief time with his wife drove him to an emotional crisis, which was followed by a stay in Clarens, Switzerland, for rest and recovery. They remained legally married but never lived together again nor had any children, though she later gave birth to three children by another man.

Tchaikovsky's marital debacle may have forced him to face the full truth concerning his sexuality. He apparently never again considered matrimony as a camouflage or escape, nor considered himself capable of loving women in the same manner as men. He wrote to his brother Anatoly from Florence, Italy on February 19, 1878,

Thanks to the regularity of my life, to the sometimes tedious but always inviolable calm, and above all, thanks to time which heals all wounds, I have completely recovered from my insanity. There's no doubt that for some months on end I was a bit insane, and only now, when I'm completely recovered, have I learned to relate objectively to everything which I did during my brief insanity. That man who in May took it into his head to marry Antonina Ivanova, 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.

A few days later, in another letter to Anatoly, he added that there was "nothing more futile than wanting to be anything other than what I am by nature."

It has been commonly held that the strain of the marriage and Tchaikovsky's emotional state immediately preceding it may have enhanced Tchaikovsky's creativity. To some extent, this may have been the case. While the Fourth Symphony was begun some months before Tchaikovsky married Antonina, both the symphony and the opera Eugene Onegin, arguably two of his finest compositions, are held up as proof of this enhanced creativity. He finished both these works in the six months between his engagement and the completion of the rest cure following his marriage breakdown. While in Clarens he also composed his Violin Concerto, with the technical assistance of one of his former students, violinist Yosif Kotek. Kotek later helped establish contact between Tchaikovsky and Nadezhda von Meck, the widow of a railway magnate, who became the composer's patron and confidante.

Like the First Piano Concerto, the Violin Concerto was rejected initially by its intended dedicatee, virtuoso and pedagogue Leopold Auer, and was premiered by Adolph Brodsky. While the work eventually achieved public success, the audience hissed at its premiere in Vienna, and it was denigrated by music critic Eduard Hanslick:

The Russian composer Tchaikovsky is surely no ordinary talent, but rather, an inflated one, obsessed with posturing as a man of genius, and lacking all discrimination and taste ... the same can be said for his new, long, and ambitious Violin Concerto. For a while it proceeds soberly, musically, and not mindlessly, but soon vulgarity gains the upper hand and dominates until the end of the first movement. The violin is no longer played: it is tugged about, torn, beaten black and blue ... The Adagio is well on the way to reconciling us and winning us over when, all too soon, it breaks off to make way for a finale that transports us to the brutal and wretched jollity of a Russian church festival. We see a host of gross and savage faces, hear crude curses, and smell the booze. In the course of a discussion of obscener illustrations, Friedrich Vischer once maintained that there were pictures whose stink one could see. Tchaikovsky's Violin Concerto confronts us for the first time with the hideous idea that there may be musical compositions whose stink one can hear.

Auer belatedly accepted the concerto, and eventually played it to great public success. In future years he taught the work to his pupils, including Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein. Auer later said about Hanslick's comment that "the last movement was redolent of vodka [...] did credit neither to his good judgment nor to his reputation as a critic."

The intensity of personal emotion now flowing through Tchaikovsky's works was entirely new to Russian music. It prompted some Russian commentators to place his name alongside that of novelist Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Like Dostoyevsky's characters, they felt the musical hero in Tchaikovsky's music persisted in exploring the meaning of life while trapped in a fatal love-death-faith triangle. The critic Osoovski wrote of Tchaikovsky and Dostoyevsky: "With a hidden passion they both stop at moments of horror, total spiritual collapse, and finding acute sweetness in the cold trepidation of the heart before the abyss, they both force the reader to experience those feelings, too."

Tchaikovsky's fame among concert audiences began to expand outside Russia, and continued to grow within it. Hans von Bülow had become a fervent champion of the composer's work after hearing some of it in a Moscow concert during Lent of 1874. In a German newspaper later that year, he praised the First String Quartet, Romeo and Juliet and other works, and he later took up many other Tchaikovsky works both as pianist and conductor. In France, Camille Benoit began introducing Tchaikovsky's music to readers of the Revue et gazette musicale de Paris. The music also received significant exposure during the 1878 International Exhibition in Paris. While Tchaikovsky's reputation as a composer grew, a corresponding increase in performances of his works did not occur until he began conducting them himself, starting in the mid 1880s. Nevertheless, by 1880, all of the operas Tchaikovsky had completed up that point had been staged, and his orchestral works had been given performances that had been sympathetically received.

Nadezhda von Meck was the wealthy widow of a Russian railway tycoon and an influential patron of the arts. Having already heard some of Tchaikovsky's work, she was encouraged by Kotek to commission some chamber pieces from him. Her support became an important element in Tchaikovsky's life; she eventually paid him an annual subsidy of 6,000 rubles, which made it possible for him to resign from the Moscow Conservatory in October 1878 at the age of 38, and concentrate on composition. With von Meck's patronage came a relationship that, at her insistence, was mainly epistolary – she stipulated they were never to meet face to face. They exchanged well over 1,000 letters between 1877 and 1890. In these letters Tchaikovsky was more open about much of his life and his creative processes than he had been to any other person. As well as being a dedicated supporter of Tchaikovsky's musical works, Nadezhda von Meck became a vital enabler in his day-to-day existence by her financial support and friendship. As he explained to her,

There is something so special about our relationship that it often stops me in my tracks with amazement. I have told you more than once, I believe, that you have come to seem to me the hand of Fate itself, watching over me and protecting me. The very fact that I do not know you personally, while feeling so close to you, accords you in my eyes the special status of an unseen but benevolent presence, like a benign Providence.

In 1884 Tchaikovsky and von Meck became related by marriage when one of her sons, Nikolay, married Tchaikovsky's niece Anna Davydova. However, in 1890 she suddenly ended her relationship with the composer. She was suffering from health problems that made writing difficult; there were family pressures, and also financial difficulties arising from the mismanagement of her estate by her son Vladimir. The break with Tchaikovsky was announced in a letter delivered by a trusted servant, rather than by the usual postal service. It contained a request that he not forget her, and was accompanied by a year's subsidy in advance. She claimed bankruptcy, which, if not literally true, was evidently a real threat at the time.

Tchaikovsky may have been aware for nearly a year of his patroness's financial difficulties. This did not stop him from continuing to take his allowance for granted (with regular protestations of his eternal gratitude), nor did he offer to return the advance he received with the farewell letter. Despite his growing celebrity throughout Europe, von Meck's allowance still made up a third of the composer's income. While he may have no longer needed her money as much as in the past, the loss of her friendship and encouragement was devastating; he remained bewildered and resentful about her abrupt disappearance for the remaining three years of his life.

Tchaikovsky returned to Moscow Conservatory in the autumn of 1879, having been away from Russia for a year after the disintegration of his marriage. However, he quickly resigned, settling in Kamenka yet traveling incessantly. During these years, assured of a regular income from Nadezhda von Meck, he wandered around Europe and rural Russia, never staying long in any one place and living mainly alone, avoiding social contact whenever possible. This may have been due in part to troubles with Antonina, who alternately agreed to, then refused, divorce, at one point exacerbating matters by moving into an apartment directly above her husband's. Tchaikovsky listed Antonina's accusations to him in detail to Modest: "I am a deceiver who married her in order to hide my true nature ... I insulted her every day, her sufferings at my hands were great ... she is appalled by my shameful vice, etc., etc." It is possible that he lived the rest of his life in dread of Antonina's power to expose publicly his sexual leanings. These factors may explain why, except for the piano trio which he wrote upon the death of Nikolai Rubinstein, his best work from this period is found in genres which did not depend heavily on personal expression.

While Tchaikovsky's reputation grew rapidly outside Russia, it was, as Alexandre Benois wrote in his memoirs, "considered obligatory [in progressive musical circles in Russia] to treat Tchaikovsky as a renegade, a master overly dependent on the West." In 1880 this assessment changed, practically overnight. During commemoration ceremonies for the Pushkin Monument in Moscow, Dostoyevsky charged that Alexander Pushkin had given a prophetic call to Russia for "universal unity" with the West. An unprecedented acclaim for Dostoyevsky's message spread throughout Russia, and disdain for Tchaikovsky's music dissipated. He even drew a cult following among the young intelligentsia of St. Petersburg, including Benois, Léon Bakst and Sergei Diaghilev.

In 1880 the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour, commissioned by Tsar Alexander I to commemorate the defeat of Napoleon in 1812, was nearing completion in Moscow; the 25th anniversary of the coronation of Alexander II in 1881 was imminent; and the 1882 Moscow Arts and Industry Exhibition was in the planning stage. Nikolai Rubinstein suggested a grand commemorative piece for use in related festivities. Tchaikovsky began the project in October 1880, finishing it within six weeks. He wrote to Nadezhda von Meck that the resulting work, the 1812 Overture, would be "very loud and noisy, but I wrote it with no warm feeling of love, and therefore there will probably be no artistic merits in it." He also warned conductor Eduard Nápravník that "I shan't be at all surprised and offended if you find that it is in a style unsuitable for symphony concerts." Nevertheless, this work has become for many, as Tchaikovsky authority Professor David Brown phrased it, "the piece by Tchaikovsky they know best."

On March 23, 1881, Nikolai Rubinstein died in Paris. Tchaikovsky was holidaying in Rome, and he went immediately to attend the funeral in Paris for his greatly respected mentor, but arrived too late (although he was part of a group of people who saw Rubinstein's coffin off on a train back to Russia). In December, he started work on his Piano Trio in A minor, "dedicated to the memory of a great artist." The trio was first performed privately at the Moscow Conservatory, where Rubinstein had been director, on the first anniversary of his death by three of its staff — pianist Sergei Taneyev, violinist Jan Hřímalý and cellist Wilhelm Fitzenhagen. The piece became extremely popular during the composer's lifetime and, in an ironic twist of fate, became Tchaikovsky's own elegy when played at memorial concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg in November 1893.

During 1884, now 44 years old, Tchaikovsky began to shed his unsociability and restlessness. In March of that year Tsar Alexander III conferred upon him the Order of St. Vladimir (fourth class), which carried with it hereditary nobility and won Tchaikovsky a personal audience with the Tsar. The Tsar's decoration was a visible seal of official approval, that helped Tchaikovsky's social rehabilitation. This rehabilitation may have been cemented in the composer's mind with the extreme success of his Third Orchestral Suite at its January 1885 premiere in Saint Petersburg, under Hans von Bülow's direction. Tchaikovsky wrote to Nadezhda von Meck: "I have never seen such a triumph. I saw the whole audience was moved, and grateful to me. These moments are the finest adornments of an artist's life. Thanks to these it is worth living and laboring." The press was likewise unanimously favorable.

In 1885, after Tchaikovsky resettled in Russia, the Tsar asked personally for a new production of Eugene Onegin to be staged in Saint Petersburg. The opera had previously been seen only in Moscow, produced by a student ensemble from the Conservatory. Though critical reception to the Saint Petersburg production of Onegin was negative, the opera drew full houses every night; 15 years later the composer's brother Modest identified this as the moment Tchaikovsky became known and appreciated by the masses, and he achieved the greatest degree of popularity ever accorded to a Russian composer. News of the opera's success spread, and the work was produced by opera houses throughout Russia and abroad. A feature of the Saint Petersburg production of Onegin was that Alexander III requested that the opera be staged not at the Mariyinsky Theater but at the Bolshoi Kamennïy Theater. This served notice that Tchaikovsky's music was replacing Italian opera as the official imperial art. In addition, thanks to Ivan Vsevolozhsky, Director of the Imperial Theaters and a patron of the composer, Tchaikovsky was awarded a lifetime pension of 3,000 rubles per year from the Tsar. This essentially made him the premier court composer, in practice if not in actual title.

While he still felt a disdain for public life, Tchaikovsky now participated in it for two reasons — his increasing celebrity and what he felt was his duty to promote Russian music. To this end, he helped support his former pupil Taneyev, who was now director of Moscow Conservatory, by attending student examinations and negotiating the sometimes sensitive relations among various members of the staff. Tchaikovsky also served as director of the Moscow branch of the Russian Musical Society during the 1889 - 1890 season. In this post, he invited a number of international celebrities to conduct, including Johannes Brahms, Antonín Dvořák and Jules Massenet.

Another area in which Tchaikovsky promoted Russian music in general as well as his own compositions was as a guest conductor. In January 1887 he substituted at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow on short notice for the first three performances of his opera Cherevichki. He had wanted to conquer conducting for at least a decade, as he saw that success outside Russia depended to some extent on his conducting his own works. Within a year of the Cherevichki performances, Tchaikovsky was in considerable demand throughout Europe and Russia, which helped him overcome a life-long stage fright and boosted his self-assurance. Conducting brought him to America in 1891, where he led the New York Music Society's orchestra in his Festival Coronation March at the inaugural concert of New York's Carnegie Hall.

In 1888 Tchaikovsky led the premiere of his Fifth Symphony in Saint Petersburg, repeating the work a week later with the first performance of his tone poem Hamlet. While both works were received with extreme enthusiasm by audiences, critics proved hostile, with César Cui calling the symphony "routine" and "meretricious." Undeterred, Tchaikovsky continued to conduct the symphony in Russia and Europe.

In November 1887, Tchaikovsky arrived in Saint Petersburg in time to hear several of the Russian Symphony Concerts, which were devoted exclusively to the music of Russian composers. One of these concerts included the first complete performance of the final version of his First Symphony; another featured the premiere of the revised version of Rimsky-Korsakov's Third Symphony. Before this visit Tchaikovsky had spent much time keeping in touch with Rimsky-Korsakov and those around him. Rimsky-Korsakov, along with Alexander Glazunov, Anatoly Lyadov and several other nationalistically minded composers and musicians, had formed a group called the Belyayev circle. This group was named after timber merchant Mitrofan Belyayev, an amateur musician who became a influential music patron and publisher after he had taken an interest in Glazunov's work. (Belyayev also funded the Russian Symphony Concerts as a forum for native composers to have their works heard in public.) During Tchaikovsky's visit, he spent much time in the company of Glazunov, Lyadov and Rimsky-Korsakov, and the somewhat fraught relationship he had endured with the Belyayev circle's predecessor, The Five, melded into something more harmonious. This relationship lasted until Tchaikovsky's death in late 1893. A side benefit of Tchaikovsky's friendship with Glazunov, Lyadov and Rimsky-Korsakov was an increased confidence in his own abilities as a composer, along with a willingness to let his musical works stand alongside those of his contemporaries. Tchaikovsky wrote to Nadezhda von Meck in January 1889, after being once again well-represented in Belyayev's concerts, that he had "always tried to place myself outside all parties and to show in every way possible that I love and respect every honorable and gifted public figure in music, whatever his tendency", and that he considered himself "flattered to appear on the concert platform" beside composers in the Belyayev circle. This was an acknowledgment of wholehearted readiness for his music to be heard with that of these composers, delivered in a tone of implicit confidence that there were no comparisons from which to fear.

In 1892, Tchaikovsky was voted a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in France; he was only the second Russian, after the sculptor Mark Antokolsky, to be so honored. The following year, the University of Cambridge in Britain awarded Tchaikovsky an honorary Doctor of Music degree.

Tchaikovsky died in Saint Petersburg on November 6, 1893, nine days after the premiere of his Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique. Though only 53 years old, he lived a long life compared to many 19th century composers. He was interred in Tikhvin Cemetery at the Alexander Nevsky Monastery, near the graves of fellow composers Alexander Borodin, Mikhail Glinka, Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, Mily Balakirev and Modest Mussorgsky. Because of the Pathétique's formal innovation and the overwhelming emotional content of its outer movements, the work was received by the public with silent incomprehension at its first performance. The second performance, led by Nápravník, took place 20 days later at a memorial concert and was much more favorably received. The Pathétique has since become one of Tchaikovsky's best known works.

Tchaikovsky's death has traditionally been attributed to cholera, most probably contracted through drinking contaminated water several days earlier. However, some, including English musicologist and Tchaikovsky authority David Brown and biographer Anthony Holden, have theorized that his death was a suicide. According to one variation of the theory, a sentence of suicide was imposed in a "court of honor" by Tchaikovsky's fellow alumni of the St. Petersburg Imperial School of Jurisprudence, as a censure of the composer's homosexuality. This unproven theory was first broached publicly by Russian musicologist Alexandra Orlova in 1979, when she emigrated to the West. Wiley writes in the New Grove (2001), "The polemics over [Tchaikovsky's] death have reached an impasse ... Rumor attached to the famous die hard ... As for illness, problems of evidence offer little hope of satisfactory resolution: the state of diagnosis; the confusion of witnesses; disregard of long-term effects of smoking and alcohol. We do not know how Tchaikovsky died. We may never find out ..."