Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893), anglicised as Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky,is a Russian composer whose works include symphonies, concertos, operas, ballets, and chamber music.

Some of these are among the most popular concert and theatrical music in the classical repertoire.

He is the first Russian composer whose music makes a lasting impression internationally, which he bolsters with appearances as a guest conductor later in his career in Europe and the United States.

One of these appearances is at the inaugural concert of Carnegie Hall in New York City in 1891.

Tchaikovsky is honored in 1884 by Tsar Alexander III, and awarded a lifetime pension in the late 1880s.

Although musically precocious, Tchaikovskyis educated for a career as a civil servant.

There is scant opportunity for a musical career in Russia at that time, and no system of public music education.

When an opportunity for such an education arises, he enters the nascent Saint Petersburg Conservatory, from where he graduates in 1865.

The formal Western-oriented teaching he receives there set him apart from composers of the contemporary nationalist movement embodied by the Russian composers of The Five, with whom his professional relationship is mixed.

Tchaikovsky's training sets him on a path to reconcile what he had learned with the native musical practices to which he had been exposed from childhood.

From this reconciliation, he forges a personal, independent but unmistakably Russian style—a task that does not prove easy.

The principles that governs melody, harmony and other fundamentals of Russian music runs completely counter to those that govern Western European music; this seems to defeat the potential for using Russian music in large-scale Western composition or from forming a composite style.

Russian culture exhibits a split personality, with its native and adopted elements having drifted apart increasingly since the time of Peter the Great, and this results in uncertainty among the intelligentsia of the country's national identity.

The principles of Russian nationalist artists are fundamentally at odds with those supporting European traditions, and this causes personal antipathies that dent Tchaikovsky's self-confidence.

Despite his many popular successes, Tchaikovsky's life is punctuated by personal crises and depression.

Contributory factors include his leaving his mother for boarding school, his mother's early death and the collapse of the one enduring relationship of his adult life, his 13-year association with the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck.

His same-sex orientation, which he keeps private, has traditionally also been considered a major factor, but musicologists now play down its importance.

His sudden death at the age of 53 is generally ascribed to cholera; there is an ongoing debate as to whether it was accidental or self-inflicted.

While his music has remained popular among audiences, critical opinions were initially mixed.

Some Russians did not feel it sufficiently representative of native musical values and were suspicious that Europeans accepted it for its Western elements.

In apparent reinforcement of the latter claim, some Europeans lauded Tchaikovsky for offering music more substantive than base exoticism, and thus transcending stereotypes of Russian classical music.

Tchaikovsky's music was dismissed as "lacking in elevated thought," according to longtime New York Times music critic Harold C. Schonberg, and its formal workings were derided as deficient for not following Western principles stringently.

Vestiges of this last claim still remain in some critical circles, but by the end of the 20th century, Tchaikovsky's status as a significant composer had become secure, with increasing numbers responding positively to its tunefulness and innovation.