The stipend from Mme von Meek brought Tchaikovsky a measure of financial independence and allowed him to leave his job at the conservatory. The epis-tolatory relationship that went with it provided him with a sounding board. He nonetheless would always struggle to recapture his emotional equilibrium. Free to travel, he wandered in Russia and through much of Europe for six years.
 

Realizing that he needed to put down roots, he settled in Klin, about 60 miles northwest of Moscow, in 1885. There he would live for the rest of his life, composing according to a rigorous daily routine, with frequent breaks for travel:

Italy in 1890; the United States in 1891 for a tour of the East Coast and the opening of Carnegie Hall, at which he conducted; England in 1893, to receive an honorary doctorate from Cambridge. Stability, of a sort, returned in his final years, enabling him to compose several works of towering greatness—including the ballet The Sleeping Beauty (1889), the opera The Queen of Spades (1890), and the Pathetique Symphony (1893)—in blazingly concentrated bursts of creativity.
 

Tchaikovsky’s death so soon after the premiere of the latter work was long believed to have been caused by cholera, but suicide cannot be ruled out. Theories abound as to why the composer might have chosen to end his own life, including one that Tchaikovsky took poison after being confronted by his old schoolmates from the School of Jurisprudence with a letter that would have exposed him as a homosexual. The true circumstances of his death may never be known.
 

At the very outset of his career, Tchaikovsky learned to sketch and score his works quickly, to polish and revise those that did not initially satisfy him (in the case of Symphonies Nos. 1 and 2 and Romeo and Juliet, several times), and to resist the temptation to rush a score to completion. He composed numerous solo piano pieces, a small number of chamber works, and more than 100 songs, many of them quite lovely. But it was in the larger forms that he excelled. Here his output was evenly balanced between works for the stage—operas and ballets —and symphonic ones, the orchestra being the common denominator. Unlike many of his colleagues, who practiced orchestration as if it were a sartorial exercise, Tchaikovsky thought directly in terms of orchestral color. His resourcefulness in the use of instruments was unsurpassed, but for him it was the orchestra itself, not individual instruments, that had a sound—which is why all of his orchestral scores have a lustrous sonority that can be immediately identified as “Tchaikovskian.”
 

Like Mozart, whose music he admired, Tchaikovsky responded eagerly to the challenge of characterization in his stage music. Of his ten operas, the ones now most likely to be encountered are Eugene Onegin (1879), The Maid of Orleans (1881, derived from Schiller), Mazeppa (1884), and The Queen of Spades. Eugene Onegin and The Queen of Spades, both based on Pushkin, summoned music of extraordinary richness and vitality from the composer and have become standard repertoire works outside Russia. Their central characters— the one (Onegin) fatalistic and disdainful, the other (Hermann) feverishly obsessed with winning at cards—resonated powerfully with Tchaikovsky, in part, no doubt,
because both spurn love when it is offered. The composer can hardly be blamed for turning Pushkin’s cynical detachment from those characters into something much more emotionally involving.
 

Among the most beautiful of all Tchaikovsky’s works are his three ballets, Swan Lake (1877), The Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker (1892), which inhabit a fairy-tale world, albeit one with a dark side. Thanks to his extraordinary skill as an orchestrator, Tchaikovsky was able to evoke a specific atmosphere in each and draw listeners into the enchanted stories. But while the plots are fanciful, the emotions touched on in the music are profoundly human. By transforming the role of music in the ballet from a grand decorative gesture into an essential component of the drama on the stage—first in Swan Lake and to an even greater extent in The Sleeping Beauty—Tchaikovsky revolutionized the art of composing for the dance.
 

As a symphonist Tchaikovsky enriched the repertoire and exerted a vital influence on later composers as diverse as Sibelius, Prokofiev, and Shostakovich. Of his first three symphonies, all accomplished exercises, the second (known as the Little Russian) has had the greatest success, mainly because of its rip-roaring finale and memorable melodic material. But it was only when he set to work on his Symphony No. 4 in F minor (1877) that Tchaikovsky discovered—in the expression of heated emotion—the key to both melodic inspiration and mastery of form, and as a consequence found his voice as a symphonic composer.

His technique had become noticeably more assured by the time he penned the programmatic Manfred Symphony (1886), even if his ideas weren’t quite so striking.
 

His final two works in the form, with interior programs known only to the composer, are notably dark. The funereal opening, wide swings of mood, and feverish—though, in the end, implausibly festive—climax of the Fifth Symphony (1888) convey a psychological drama that could hardly be put into words in any case. With the Pathetique (Symphony No. 6 in B minor), Tchaikovsky went much deeper, fashioning a symphony of the most profound personal confession, as original in method and formal concept as it was in tone and emotional content. The English musicologist David Brown has rightly characterized it as “the most truly original symphony to have been composed in the seventy years since Beethoven’s Ninth.”

Tchaikovsky was like Racine’s Phedre, desperately trying throughout his adult life to hide from the light of day the dark flame of passion—in his case, a passion for young men. That he was troubled by and ashamed of his sexuality to the depths of his soul, in a way we can scarcely imagine today, has been well documented. Deeply religious, he viewed it as a sickness: To say otherwise would be to graft a late-20th-century attitude onto his preternaturally sensitive 19th-century character. What he dreaded more than anything was public exposure.

Music was Tchaikovsky’s salvation. He saw the expression of emotion as the central concern of his art and found in the act of composition the freedom to emote, and the means to control emotion, that he sorely missed in his personal life. It is true that not all of his music is top-drawer; some of his scores appear to be formally awkward or short on content, and sometimes the process of argument seems feeble. But the best of his music is supremely accomplished, undeniably moving, and more than occasionally transcendent.