Pyotr Ilich Chaykovskiy

He was born on 25 April 1840 in a settlement near the Kamsko-Votkinsk plant in Vyatka Governorate (now the city of Votkinsk, Udmurtia). His father, Ilya Petrovich Tchaikovsky (1795–1880), an outstanding Russian engineer, was the son of Pyotr Fyodorovich Chayka, who was born in 1745 in the village of Nikolaevka near Poltava (Ukraine) and later changed his surname to Tchaikovsky. He was the second child of Fyodor Chayka (1695–1767) and his wife Anna (1717–?). Pyotr Fyodorovich studied at the seminary in Kyiv and later received a medical education in St Petersburg. From 1770 to 1777 he served in the army as an assistant military doctor, later becoming a medical officer in Kungur, Perm Governorate. In 1782 he was transferred to Vyatka (Kazan Governorate). In 1776 he married Anastasia Stepanovna Posokhova (born in 1751); they had 11 children. Ilya Petrovich, the composer’s father, was the tenth child. After graduating from the Mining Cadet Corps in St Petersburg, he entered the service of the Department of Mining and Salt Affairs. Widowed in 1833, he married Alexandra Andreevna Assier, and in 1837 moved with her to the Urals, where he was appointed head of the Kamsko-Votkinsk steelworks. Pyotr was the second child in the family: his elder brother Nikolai was born in 1838, and in 1842 his sister Alexandra (later Davydova) and Hippolit were born. The twin brothers Anatoly and Modest were born in 1850.

Pyotr Ilyich’s parents loved music. His mother played the piano and sang, and the house had a mechanical organ, an orchestrina, through which little Pyotr first heard Mozart’s Don Giovanni. While the family lived in Votkinsk, they often heard in the evenings the melodious folk songs of the factory workers and peasants. From a letter by the governess Fanny Dürbach to Pyotr Ilyich: “I especially loved the quiet, gentle evenings at the end of summer... from the