page_title: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
section_title: Dedicatees and collaborators
hierarchical_section_title: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky / Music / Reception / Dedicatees and collaborators
caption_attribution_description: English: Photo of Marius Petipa ()Deutsch: Kabinettkarte von Marius Petipa, um 1890—1895. Die handschriftliche Widmung ist mit dem 14. Februar 1898 datiert.
context_page_description: Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was a Russian composer of the Romantic period. He was the first Russian composer whose music made 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 movement embodied by the Russian composers of The Five with whom his professional relationship was mixed.
  Tchaikovsky's training set him on a path to reconcile what he had learned with the native musical practices to which he had been exposed from childhood. From that reconciliation, he forged a personal but unmistakably Russian style.
context_section_description: Tchaikovsky's relationship with collaborators was mixed. Like Nikolai Rubinstein with the First Piano Concerto, virtuoso and pedagogue Leopold Auer rejected the Violin Concerto initially but changed his mind; he played it to great public success and taught it to his students, who included Jascha Heifetz and Nathan Milstein. Wilhelm Fitzenhagen "intervened considerably in shaping what he considered 'his' piece", the Variations on a Rococo Theme, according to music critic Michael Steinberg. Tchaikovsky was angered by Fitzenhagen's license but did nothing; the Rococo Variations were published with the cellist's amendments. 
  His collaboration on the three ballets went better and in Marius Petipa, who worked with him on the last two, he might have found an advocate. When The Sleeping Beauty was seen by its dancers as needlessly complicated, Petipa convinced them to put in the extra effort. Tchaikovsky compromised to make his music as practical as possible for the dancers and was accorded more creative freedom than ballet composers were usually accorded at the time. He responded with scores that minimized the rhythmic subtleties normally present in his work but were inventive and rich in melody, with more refined and imaginative orchestration than in the average ballet score.
caption: Marius Petipa
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