Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky is just as misunderstood as he is popular. The prestigious Schleswig-Holstein Music Festival demonstrates how much is still unknown about the composer. In the view of the ...

Tchaikovsky was a blazingly inventive genius and brilliant orchestrator who pushed musical intensity towards its outer limits. What makes Tchaikovsky’s music so special? Tchaikovsky possessed an ...

Purchase this and other timeless New Criterion essays in our hard-copy reprint series. In many ways Wiley’s book is a revisionist history. The traditional view, especially prevalent among musicians, ...

One of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov’s least known operas is Tsar Saltan. A skip-along scherzo in its second act has become one of the inevitable pieces in any violinist’s repertory: Flight of the Bumblebee ...

Pyotr Illyich Tchaikovsky’s famed 1812 Overture was first performed, outdoors, at the base of the majestic Cathedral of Christ the Savior in Moscow. His beloved ballet, the Nutcracker, was introduced ...

However, he was initially educated for a career in the civil service, and his first job was as an assistant in the Ministry of Justice. Tchaikovsky then enrolled in the Saint Petersburg Conservatory ...

Ivan Hewett is The Telegraph’s Classical Music Critic and an author whose works include Music: Healing The Rift, a personal history of modern music. He has been involved in music as a composer, ...

A new book claims that the Russian composer is not the tormented genius he is portrayed as, but a fun-loving man with ‘a fabulous life’ Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky has long been portrayed as a ...