How Did Tchaikovsky Die? Cholera, Rumour and the Life Behind Swan Lake

Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky died in St Petersburg on 6 November 1893, at the age of 53, and the official cause was cholera, said to have been caught from drinking unboiled water at a local restaurant. In the 1980s, however, scholars in Britain began to speculate that he had taken his own life, and the argument has never been settled. Roland John Wiley, writing in the New Grove dictionary, summed up the honest position: "We do not know how Tchaikovsky died. We may never find out." The mystery is famous, but it is the least interesting thing about him. The life that came before it produced Swan Lake, The Nutcracker and some of the most loved symphonies ever written.

A boy from the Urals who was meant to be a clerk

Tchaikovsky was born on 7 May 1840 in Votkinsk, a factory town in what is now the Russian republic of Udmurtia, far from the cultural capitals. His father, Ilya, was a mining engineer who managed the local ironworks. Pyotr started piano lessons at five, but nobody in the family imagined music as a career. In 1850 he was sent to the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in St Petersburg, roughly 1,300 kilometres from home, to be trained for the civil service.

Four years later his mother, Alexandra, died of cholera. He was fourteen. It is hard to read that sentence without thinking of how his own life would officially end, but it also explains why the loss marked him so deeply: the same disease took the person he was closest to as a child.

He graduated in 1859 and spent about three years as a junior official in the Ministry of Justice. One of his music teachers had even advised him, in 1855, against trying to become a musician.

Choosing music in his twenties

The turning point came in 1862, when the new St Petersburg Conservatory opened. Tchaikovsky enrolled, studying harmony with Nikolai Zaremba and composition with the pianist Anton Rubinstein, and graduated in 1865. That same year Anton's brother, Nikolai Rubinstein, offered him a post teaching theory at the Moscow Conservatory for 50 roubles a month.

This matters for understanding his place in Russian music. He was one of the first Russian composers to receive a formal, Western-style conservatory education. The rival group of nationalists known as "The Five", championed by Mily Balakirev and the critic Vladimir Stasov, distrusted that kind of training. Tchaikovsky was ambivalent about them but stayed on friendly terms, and he even worked with Balakirev on his fantasy-overture Romeo and Juliet (1869), which the group admired.

Swan Lake: the flop that became a classic

In May 1875 the Bolshoi Theatre's Vladimir Begichev commissioned a ballet score from Tchaikovsky for 800 roubles, and he finished it by April 1876. Swan Lake premiered in Moscow on 4 March 1877. Critics were unimpressed: the music was called "too noisy, too 'Wagnerian' and too symphonic", and the choreography was dismissed as unmemorable.

The irony is that "too symphonic" is exactly what later audiences loved. Tchaikovsky treated ballet music as serious music rather than background for dancers. The ballet only found its lasting form after his death, in the 1895 revival in St Petersburg by Marius Petipa and Lev Ivanov, with the score revised by Riccardo Drigo. Most companies still base their productions on that version, and Swan Lake is now one of the most popular ballets of all time.

A disastrous marriage and a patron he never met

In 1877, at 37, Tchaikovsky married a former student, Antonina Miliukova. The marriage collapsed after about two and a half months; he left, emotionally overwrought and unable to compose. Biographers generally agree that Tchaikovsky was homosexual, a subject Soviet authorities suppressed and that Russian officials have continued to deny. Seen in that light, the marriage looks less like a romance than an attempt to live the life society expected.

At almost the same moment, something unusual rescued him. Nadezhda von Meck, the wealthy widow of a railway magnate, became his patron from 1877 to 1890, and the two famously never met in person. Her allowance freed him from teaching. Wiley argues that, largely thanks to her, Tchaikovsky became the first full-time professional Russian composer.

The years that followed were remarkably productive. During his travels abroad in the late 1870s he worked on the opera Eugene Onegin, the Violin Concerto and the Fourth Symphony. In 1880 he wrote the 1812 Overture in about six weeks, a piece he did not especially value but that audiences have loved ever since.

Critics who got it wrong

Tchaikovsky's career is full of famous rejections. Nikolai Rubinstein, his friend and employer, initially rejected the First Piano Concerto. The violinist Leopold Auer at first turned down the Violin Concerto, then later played it with great success. The Viennese critic Eduard Hanslick wrote that the Violin Concerto was music "whose stink one can hear".

Both concertos are now core concert repertoire. For a learner of any language, it is a comforting story: first reactions are not final verdicts.

The Nutcracker and international fame

From 1887 Tchaikovsky conducted his own music across Russia and Europe, and in 1891 he travelled to the United States, where he conducted at the opening of Carnegie Hall in New York. Cambridge University gave him an honorary doctorate in 1893.

His last ballet, The Nutcracker, premiered at the Mariinsky Theatre in St Petersburg on 18 December 1892, on a double bill with his opera Iolanta. It was based on E. T. A. Hoffmann's story as adapted by Alexandre Dumas, and the first performance was not considered a success. The score, with its shimmering use of the celesta in the Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy, was received more warmly than the plot.

Its real triumph came in America. George Balanchine's staging for New York City Ballet in 1954 helped make it an annual Christmas tradition, and major American companies reportedly earn around 40% of their yearly ticket revenue from it.

The last symphony and the open question

In 1893 Tchaikovsky completed his Sixth Symphony, the Pathétique, dedicated to his nephew Vladimir Davydov. It ends not with a triumphant finale but with a slow, fading movement, which is one reason so many listeners have heard it as a farewell. Weeks later he was dead.

Here it is important to separate evidence from storytelling. The official account is cholera. The suicide theories that emerged a century later are speculation, and the debate, in Wiley's words, has "reached an impasse". Reading the Pathétique as a suicide note is tempting, but it is an interpretation, not a fact. He was buried at the Tikhvin Cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Monastery in St Petersburg.

Why his music still speaks

Tchaikovsky's music has never gone out of style, and in the US and Britain his following is said to be second only to Beethoven's. His secret was not complex counterpoint but emotional directness: long, singing melodies, repeated and intensified until they become almost overwhelming. He also bridged two worlds. Some Russians thought him too Western, while many Europeans heard him as more than a "Russian exotic". He proved that a Russian composer could speak a musical language the whole world understood.

Learn with Tchaikovsky: English phrases about music and feelings

Phrase	Meaning	Example
to wear your heart on your sleeve	to show your feelings openly	His music wears its heart on its sleeve.
a late bloomer	someone who succeeds later than usual	He was a late bloomer who started serious study at 22.
to fall flat	to fail to impress an audience	The first Swan Lake fell flat with critics.
to stand the test of time	to remain valued for a long time	His ballets have stood the test of time.
to give someone goosebumps	to cause a strong emotional reaction	The final movement gives me goosebumps.

Try this: Put on two minutes of Swan Lake or The Nutcracker. Then write three English sentences about how it makes you feel, using at least two phrases from the table, for example: "This melody gives me goosebumps."