Pyotr Tchaikovsky INTRODUCTION Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840 in Votkinsk, a small town in present-day Udmurtia (at the time the Vyatka Guberniya under Imperial Russia). He was the son of Ilya Petrovich Tchaikovsky, a mining engineer in the government mines, and the second of his three wives, Alexandra Andreyevna Assier, a Russian woman of French ancestry. He was the older brother (by some ten years) of the dramatist, librettist, and translator Modest Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Pyotr began piano lessons at the age of five, and in a few months he was already proficient at Friedrich Kalkbrenner's...