7 The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time 7Musical Society. When St. Petersburg Conservatory opened
the following fall, Tchaikovsky was among its first students.
Tchaikovsky spent nearly three years at St. Petersburg
Conservatory, studying harmony and counterpoint with
Nikolay Zaremba and composition and instrumentation
with Anton Rubinstein. Among his earliest orchestral
works was an overture entitled The Storm (composed 1864),
a mature attempt at dramatic program music. The first
public performance of any of his works took place in
August 1865, when Johann Strauss the Younger conducted
Tchaikovsky’s Characteristic Dances at a concert in Pavlovsk,
near St. Petersburg.
Middle Years
After graduating in December 1865, Tchaikovsky moved
to Moscow to teach music theory at the Russian Musical
Society, soon thereafter renamed the Moscow Conserva-
tory. He found teaching difficult, but his friendship with
the director, Nikolay Rubinstein, helped make it bearable.
Within five years Tchaikovsky had produced his first sym-
phony, Symphony No. 1 in G Minor (composed 1866; Winter
Daydreams), and his first opera, The Voyevoda (1868).
In 1868 Tchaikovsky met a Belgian mezzo-soprano
named Désirée Artôt, with whom he fleetingly contem-
plated a marriage, but their engagement ended in failure.
The opera The Voyevoda was well received, even by the The
Five, an influential group of nationalistic Russian compos-
ers who never appreciated the cosmopolitanism of
Tchaikovsky’s music. In 1869 Tchaikovsky completed
Romeo and Juliet, an overture in which he subtly adapted
sonata form to mirror the dramatic structure of
Shakespeare’s play. Nikolay Rubinstein conducted a success-
ful performance of this work the following year, and it