Title: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Content:  Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky ( ; 7 May 1840 – 6 November 1893 ) was a Russian composer of the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music would make a lasting impression internationally. He was honored in 1884 by Tsar Alexander III and awarded a lifetime pension. Although musically precocious, Tchaikovsky was educated for a career as a civil servant. There was scant opportunity for a musical career in Russia at the time and no system of public music education. When an opportunity for such an education arose, he entered the nascent Saint Petersburg Conservatory, from which he graduated in 1865. The formal Western-oriented teaching that he received there set him apart from composers of the contemporary nationalist 
Title: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Content:  was now director of Moscow Conservatory, by attending student examinations and negotiating the sometimes sensitive relations among various members of the staff. He served as director of the Moscow branch of the Russian Musical Society during the 1889–1890 season. In this post, he invited many international celebrities to conduct, including Johannes Brahms, Antonín Dvořák and Jules Massenet. During this period, Tchaikovsky also began promoting Russian music as a conductor, In January 1887, he substituted, on short notice, at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow for performances of his opera Cherevichki. Within a year, he was in considerable demand throughout Europe and Russia. These 
Title: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Content:  and not at the Mariinsky Theatre, he served notice that Tchaikovsky's music was replacing Italian opera as the official imperial art. In addition, at the instigation of Ivan Vsevolozhsky, Director of the Imperial Theaters and a patron of the composer, Tchaikovsky was awarded a lifetime annual pension of 3,000 rubles from the Tsar. This made him the premier court composer, in practice if not in actual title.  Despite Tchaikovsky's disdain for public life, he now participated in it as part of his increasing celebrity and out of a duty he felt to promote Russian music. He helped support his former pupil Sergei Taneyev, 
Title: Russian classical music
Content:  Moscow: the former trained the great Russian composer Peter Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840–93), best known for ballets like Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker. He remains Russia's best-known composer outside Russia. Easily the most famous successor in his style is Sergei Rachmaninoff (1873–1943), who studied at the Moscow Conservatory (where Tchaikovsky himself taught). Alexander Glazunov also took this romantic style. The late 19th and early 20th century saw the third wave of Russian classics: Igor Stravinsky (1882–1971), Alexander Scriabin (1872–1915), Sergei Prokofiev (1891–1953) and Dmitri Shostakovich (1906–1975). They were experimental in style and musical language. Some of them emigrated after the Russian revolution, though Prokofiev eventually returned and contributed to Soviet music as well.
Title: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Content:  saved much of Tchaikovsky's work from this period, including his earliest known compositions, and became a source of several childhood anecdotes. Tchaikovsky began piano lessons at age five. Precocious, within three years he had become as adept at reading sheet music as his teacher. His parents, initially supportive, hired a tutor, bought an orchestrion (a form of barrel organ that could imitate elaborate orchestral effects), and encouraged his piano study for both aesthetic and practical reasons. However, they decided in 1850 to send Tchaikovsky to the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in Saint Petersburg. They had both graduated from institutes in Saint Petersburg and the School 
Title: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Content:  the time of Peter the Great. That resulted in uncertainty among the intelligentsia about the country's national identity, an ambiguity mirrored in Tchaikovsky's career. Despite his many popular successes, Tchaikovsky's life was punctuated by personal crises and depression. Contributory factors included his early separation from his mother for boarding school followed by his mother's early death; the death of his close friend and colleague Nikolai Rubinstein; and the collapse of the one enduring relationship of his adult life, his 13-year association with the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck, who was his patron even though they never met. His homosexuality, which he kept private, has traditionally also been considered a major factor though some musicologists now downplay its importance. Tchaikovsky's 
Title: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and The Five
Content:  Tchaikovsky remained there for the rest of his three-year civil service career. In 1861, Tchaikovsky attended classes in music theory organized by the Russian Musical Society and taught by Nikolai Zaremba. A year later he followed Zaremba to the Saint Petersburg Conservatory. Tchaikovsky would not give up his Ministry post "until I am quite certain that I am destined to be a musician rather than a civil servant." From 1862 to 1865 he studied harmony, counterpoint and fugue with Zaremba, while Rubinstein taught him instrumentation and composition. In 1863 he abandoned his civil service career and studied music full-time, graduating in December 1865.
Title: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Content:  From 1867 to 1878, Tchaikovsky combined his professorial duties with music criticism while continuing to compose. This activity exposed him to a range of contemporary music and afforded him the opportunity to travel abroad. In his reviews, he praised Beethoven, considered Brahms overrated and, despite his admiration, took Schumann to task for poor orchestration. He appreciated the staging of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen at its inaugural performance in Bayreuth (Germany), but not the music, calling Das Rheingold "unlikely nonsense, through which, from time to time, sparkle unusually beautiful and astonishing details". A recurring theme he addressed was the poor state of Russian opera.
Title: Boris Tchaikovsky
Content:  Boris Alexandrovich Tchaikovsky (Бори́с Алекса́ндрович Чайко́вский; 10 September 1925 – 7 February 1996), PAU, was a Soviet and Russian composer, born in Moscow, whose oeuvre includes orchestral works, chamber music and film music. He is considered as part of the second generation of Russian composers, following in the steps of Pyotr Tchaikovsky (to whom he was not related ) and especially Mussorgsky. He was admired by Dmitri Shostakovich, with whom he studied, who (according to Per Skans in his notes for a recording) suggested in a letter of 1 February 1969 to Isaak Glikman, that "If Barshai's orchestra (the Moscow chamber orchestra) makes a guest appearance in Leningrad playing Vainberg's Tenth Symphony and Boris Tchaikovsky's Sinfonietta, you really have to hear them". Of his larger-scale works almost all have been recorded. Boris Tchaikovsky generally wrote in a tonal style, although he made brief forays into serialism.
Title: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
Content:  In November 1887, Tchaikovsky arrived at Saint Petersburg in time to hear several of the Russian Symphony Concerts, devoted exclusively to the music of Russian composers. One included the first complete performance of his revised First Symphony; another featured the final version of Third Symphony of Nikolai Rimsky-Korsakov, with whose circle Tchaikovsky was already in touch. Rimsky-Korsakov, with Alexander Glazunov, Anatoly Lyadov and several other nationalistically minded composers and musicians, had formed a group known as the Belyayev circle, named after a merchant and amateur musician who became an influential music patron and publisher. Tchaikovsky spent much time in this circle, becoming far more at ease with them than he had been with the 'Five' and increasingly confident in showcasing his music alongside theirs. This relationship lasted until Tchaikovsky's death. In 1892, Tchaikovsky was voted a member of the Académie des Beaux-Arts in France, only the second Russian subject to be so honored (the first was sculptor Mark Antokolsky). The following year, the University of Cambridge in England awarded Tchaikovsky an honorary Doctor of Music degree.

Question: what did peter tchaikovsky do?
Answer: Composer.