Tchaikovsky was born on May 7, 1840, in Kamsko-Votkinsk, a small industrial town east of Moscow. Tchaikovsky's father was superintendent of government-owned mines. Because his mother was half French, and it was a customary practice among upper-class Russians of the period, he had a French governess. Pyotr’s mother Alexandra was a nervous epileptic, of whom Pyotr inherited his tendency to real or imagined ill-health, fits of hysteria, and deep depression. Even as a youngster, Pyotr Tchaikovsky was hypersensitive; the slightest scolding would reduce him to a flood of tears. Tchaikovsky was musically precocious, but his interest in the subject was not actively encouraged because his parents considered that it had an unhealthy effect on an already neurotically excitable child. One night after a party, Alexandra found him awake, pointing to his forehead, and crying, “Oh this music, this music! Take it away! It’s here and it won’t let me sleep!” Pyotr’s father was in possession of a great variety of music, playable on the “Orchestrion,” a rudimentary form of a record player. It was his listening of tunes from the opera Don Giovanni on the Orchestrion that Pyotr dedicated his lifelong admiration to Mozart. “It was due to Mozart that I devoted my life to music,” he wrote many years later. Tchaikovsky began to play the piano early in childhood. His first teacher was Maria Palchikova, a freed serf. Within a year, Tchaikovsky was able to play better than she could. He adored his governess, but she was dismissed in 1848 when his father changed his post and moved to Moscow and then to St. Petersburg, where the boy entered the preparatory department of the School of Jurisprudence in 1850. There he was obviously disturbed by being treated as a "country bumpkin," but he soon settled down happily.A reluctant student, Tchaikovsky worked without much interest, but was naturally gifted and quickly passed through his school’s upper divisions.

His state of mind was more seriously affected in 1854 when he was 14 and his mother, whom he loved with all the ardour of an acutely introspective child, died of cholera. To alleviate the distress caused to him both by her death and by his easygoing father's comparative indifference to it, he composed a short waltz for piano and even thought of composing an opera. His abnormal love for his now-deceased mother and the ineffectualness of his father did nothing to hinder his latent homosexuality, and the disciplinary regime of the all-male School of Jurisprudence cannot have helped. There is, however, no evidence of his having given any active outlet to his secret desires. During these school days, desultory singing, piano, and harmony lessons were all the musical education he received, complemented by increasingly numerous visits to the opera, which had a lasting influence on his musical taste. He kept up with his profound interest in music, taking lessons from the well-known concert pianist Rudolph Kündinger. Kündinger was impressed by Pyotr’s ability to improvise, but beyond that, Pyotr’s teacher though that he had no unusual talent for music. When Pyotr’s father asked Kündinger if he should change his mind and consider encouraging the boy’s interest in the piano with a view to a career, Kündinger advised him against it. Kündinger later said, “certainly [Pyotr] was gifted, he had a good ear and a good memory, a fine touch, but otherwise there was nothing, absolutely nothing, that suggested a composer.”

Tchaikovsky entered the Ministry of Justice in St. Petersburg as civil servant. To ordinary Russians, civil servants were then people to be shunned and hated: they represented petty officialdom and oppression. Tchaikovsky was not naturally suited to such a job. He remained at the Ministry of Justice for four years, bored but dutiful.

He entered the newly founded St. Petersburg Conservatory of Music in 1862. His job as a clerk in the Ministry of Justice was hardly interesting enough to prevent his increasing absorption with music. A tale is told of his absentmindedly tearing pieces from an official document, munching at them steadily, and recovering his senses only to find that he had consumed them altogether. Also, Tchaikovsky had plenty of time for music, playing the piano and going to concerts. He joined the Ministry’s own choral group, and in 1861, he began to study musical theory under Nikolai Zaremba, the Head of the Russian Musical Society. One of Tchaikovsky’s music teachers was the pianist and composer Anton Rubenstein, who became the first directory of the St. Petersburg Music Conservatory. He had observed that Tchaikovsky’s technique was merely ameteur, so he corrected the young man’s exercises. Rubenstein was the first to see real signs of talent, but had to criticize Tchaikovsky for years of careless work. Tchaikovsky began to realize that he had to be serious about his music in order to make true progress. When he failed to get a promotion he had wanted at the Ministry, he decided to resign and start his career all over again. Tchaikovsky entered the St. Petersburg Music Conservatory at the age of twenty-two, and was much older than most of the other students. But he also had more experience, and supported himself by teaching pupils of his own. He learned how to play the organ and mastered the flute, which he then played in the Conservatory orchestra. Rubenstein had been a moving force in Tchaikovsky’s composing career by criticizing all of his compositions. His first orchestral score (composed 1864), an overture based on Aleksandr Ostrovsky's play The Storm, is remarkable in showing many of the stylistic features later to be associated with his music and a youthful vulgarity that was not the only constituent in it to appall his primly Mendelssohnian teacher, Anton Rubinstein. Rubenstein was very critical of Tchaikovsky’s most important student piece, The Storm Overture, inspired by a melancholy play by Russian dramatist Ostrovsky. While Rubenstein had expected Tchaikovsky’s composition to be dark and dreary, Tchaikovsky instead created a colorful, dramatic piece of “program music,” including unusual instruments such as the harp, oboe, and tuba. Rubenstein was furious because this was not the kind of thing he expected from his normally obedient students. Even so, he was offered in late 1865 a post as professor of harmony by Rubinstein's brother at the Moscow Conservatory.He was also very critical of Tchaikovsky’s graduation exercise, a cantata representing Schiller’s Ode to Joy. The cantata was performed January 12, 1866, in the presence of a distinguished audience – but Tchaikovsky was too nervous face the pressure of the occasion. Rubenstein threatened to withhold Tchaikovsky’s diploma, but nobody could deny Pyotr’s outstanding talent. His presence was now known. Tchaikovsky was later offered a job as professor of harmony at the newly-established Moscow Conservatory, where Anton Rubenstein’s younger brother, Nikolai, was directory. Nikolai offered lodgings and support to Pyotr for the following five years. Nevertheless, as Tchaikovsky faced the new pressures of teaching, he overworked himself and his students.

Tchaikovsky settled down comfortably in Moscow in January 1866, although he underwent a mental crisis as a consequence of overwork on his Symphony No. 1 in G Minor (Winter Daydreams), Opus 13 (1866). His compositions of the late 1860s and early '70s reveal a distinct affinity with the music of the nationalist group of composers in St. Petersburg, both in their treatment of folk song and in their harmonies deriving from a common link with Mikhail Glinka, the "father" of a Russian nationalist style. He corresponded with the leader of the group, Mily Balakirev, at whose suggestion he wrote a fantasy overture, Romeo and Juliet (1869). Tchaikovsky's intrinsic charm, testified to by many who knew him, is nowhere more apparent than in the nationalist comic opera Vakula the Smith (1874; first performed 1876), which in its revised form, Cherevichki (The Little Shoes), is of similar merit to another opera, Sorochintsy Fair (also based on one of Nikolay Gogol's Ukrainian tales), by the most original composer in the Petersburg group, Modest Mussorgsky. Tchaikovsky's opera, however, is much closer to Balakirev's own folkloric idiom than anything Mussorgsky ever wrote.

An aura of mystery surrounded Tchaikovsky's death. The story circulated at the time of his death was that he drank a glass of unboiled water during the cholera epidemic then sweeping the city and died of the disease. Scholarship in the second half of the 20th century, however, has indicated that, in order to avoid a scandal, he probably was induced to commit suicide (by poisoning) after being accused of a romantic involvement with a male member of the imperial family. In any event, the rumour was soon rife that he had committed suicide as a result of the failure of his last symphony, whose very title, Pathétique, if nothing else, was enough to ensure it instant notoriety.

  Among the most subjective of composers, Tchaikovsky is inseparable from his music. His work is a manifestation, sometimes charming, often showy, and occasionally vulgar, of repressed feelings that became more and more despairing in later years and culminated in the composition of the Sixth Symphony, one of the greatest symphonic works of its time. Though unequal, his music shows a wealth of melodic inspiration and imagination and a flair for orchestration. Its lapses of taste are partly redeemed by enormous technical efficiency. Though his later work rejected conscious Russian nationalism, its underlying sentiment and character are as distinctively Russian as that of the Russian nationalist composers. Tchaikovsky's success in bridging the gulf between the musician and the general public partly accounts for the position he enjoys in the Soviet Union.

No composer since Tchaikovsky has suffered more from changes of fashion or from the extremes of over- and undervaluation. On the one hand, he achieved an enormous popularity with a wide audience, largely through his more emotional works; on the other, the almost hypnotic effect that he was able to induce led to serious questioning of his true musical quality. He is certainly the greatest master of the classical ballet. The symphonies may be variable in quality but all contain important music. The last three are deservedly famous, though to these should be added the neglected Manfred Symphony. The First Piano Concerto and the Violin Concerto, on the other hand, deserve a higher reputation than vehicles for virtuosity. Notable among his other orchestral works are the early Romeo and Juliet Overture and the exquisite Serenade for Strings. Of the operas, Eugene Onegin is a masterpiece and The Queen of Spades dramatically effective. His string quartets are excellent, but his piano music is largely undistinguished. His numerous songs include several fine examples.