Peter Tchaikovsky

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with his hand"! If he had only been able to reconcile that lifelong feud between his over-personal heart and his magnanimous mind, he would have been saved endless suffering. But he was not: in his music his self-criticism, as on of his best biographers, Edwin Evans, has remarked, "came after and not during composition"-he destroyed score after score. And in daily life he never learned to apply the advice of a wit tot he victim of a temperament like his: "less remorse and more reform."
As a youth he reluctantly studied law, as much bore by it as Schumann had been, and even became a petty clerk in the Ministry of Justice. But in his early twenties he rebelled, and against his family's wishes had the courage to throw himself into the study of music at the St. Petersburg Conservatory. He was a ready improviser, playing well for dancing and had a naturally rich sense of harmony, but was so little schooled as to be astonished when a cousin told him it was possible to modulate form any ...

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the second and third, one strongly "folk and the other rather featureless, in spite of a beautiful slow movement. But the First Symphony is interesting biographically for two reasons. Over it, to begin with , its composer worked his too-delicate nerves into a state of almost pathological strain that was to recur at intervals all his life. he suffers from insomnia, a sensation of hammering in the head, and even hallucinations; and so painful was the whole experience that he never again composed at night.

Of more importance is the vivid example his symphony give us of the contrast between his passionately narrow attitude in personal relations and his magnanimity and candour whenever he ...

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