Boris Tchaikovsky
Boris Alexandrovich Tchaikovsky was a Soviet and Russian composer, pianist, and teacher. He was born on September 10, 1925, in Moscow. His father, Alexander Tchaikovsky, was a specialist in statistics and economic geography, and his mother, Tatyana Tchaikovskaya, was a physician. His parents knew literature and art well and loved music, and the ethical foundation they gave him remained an inner support throughout his life.
As a child he lived and studied in Moscow, attending a general school in Daev Lane. His first music teacher was Nikolai Slavin. In 1934 he entered the Gnesin Music School, where he studied with A. Golovina, Elena Gnesina, and E. Messner. He then spent two years at the Gnesin Musical College, studying with E. Messner, Vissarion Shebalin, Elena Gnesina, I. Sposobin, and A. Mutli. In 1941 he entered the Moscow Conservatory named after Pyotr Tchaikovsky, graduating in 1949. He studied piano with Lev Oborin and composition with Nikolai Myaskovsky, Vissarion Shebalin, and Dmitri Shostakovich.
For a time Tchaikovsky worked as an editor at All-Union Radio. In 1952 he decided to devote himself entirely to composition. He wrote a large number of works in many genres and was noted for a rare working method: he would first create large musical sections in his imagination, then play them from memory on an instrument, and only afterwards write them down cleanly in full score. He also loved invention and technology. He later became active in the governing bodies of the Union of Soviet Composers.
From 1989 he was professor of composition at the Gnesin State Musical-Pedagogical Institute, which from 1992 became the Russian Academy of Music named after Gnesin. Among his students were Yuri Abdokov and S. Prokudin. In the musical world he was also closely connected with Mieczyslaw Weinberg: together with Nikolai Peyko he witnessed Weinberg's arrest on February 6, 1953, and Weinberg later dedicated to him the Chamber Symphony No. 4 for string orchestra and clarinet and the Piano Sonata No. 6.
Tchaikovsky created an extensive catalogue of orchestral, concertante, chamber, piano, vocal, theatrical, radio, and film music. His major works include four symphonies, among them the Second Symphony, the Sevastopol Symphony, and the Symphony with Harp; the Chamber Symphony; concertos for clarinet, cello, violin, and piano; seven string quartets; piano sonatas; chamber works for varied ensembles; the cantata Signs of the Zodiac; vocal cycles on poems by Mikhail Lermontov, Alexander Pushkin, Fyodor Tyutchev, Nikolai Zabolotsky, and Joseph Brodsky; and the unfinished opera The Star. He also composed music for numerous radio productions, stage plays, and films, including Seryozha, Balzaminov's Marriage, Burn, Burn, My Star, and The Adolescent.
He received major Soviet honors, including Merited Art Worker of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1969, People's Artist of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic in 1982, People's Artist of the USSR in 1985, and the USSR State Prize in 1969 for his Second Symphony. In 1996 he was also awarded, posthumously, the Moscow Mayor's Prize in literature and the arts for his musical educational activity. During his lifetime and in the first years after his death, the main body of his works was published by the publishers Muzyka, Soviet Composer/Composer Publishing Association, and Russian Musical Society; from 2007 previously unpublished works began to be issued by the Boris Tchaikovsky Society.
Boris Tchaikovsky died on February 7, 1996, in Moscow. After the funeral service on February 10 at the Church of the Transfiguration of the Lord, he was buried at the Armenian Cemetery in Moscow. His wife was Yanina-Irena Moshinskaya, later known in baptism as Ioanna, founder of the society for the preservation and study of his creative legacy. She was buried beside him. His contemporary Mieczyslaw Weinberg wrote of his music that his symphonies, concertos, quartets, and sonatas proved that no genre is dying as long as talent turns any genre into a stimulus for fantasy, inspiration, communication with people, and the realization of long-cherished or spontaneous ideas.