实用艺术英语unit 6 B课件.ppt

;1 Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky is remembered today as the greatest Russian composer ever. He wrote music which stands very clearly in the European tradition, but has a distinctly Russian flavor. He was a master of melody, setting glorious melodies against distinctively Russian rhythms in a way that probably nobody else has ever done. 2 There is no definitive spelling for Tchaikovsky’s name in the Roman alphabet that we use, since Russians use the Cyrillic alphabet. He is sometimes referred to as Pyotr Ilyich Chaikovsky. ;3 Born in 1840 in Votkinsk, Russia, to an upper-class family, Tchaikovsky was a highly-strung child. Although musically gifted, he was not encouraged by his family. When he was eight, the family moved to Moscow and then to St Petersburg. His mother died of cholera when he was 14 and this affected him deeply. He studied law and got a reasonably good job in the civil service but didn’t like it. When he was 22, he left the civil service and entered the Conservatory of Music in St Petersburg as a student, teaching music privately to pay for his studies. At 26, he was offered a job in the Moscow Conservatory as a professor. The salary from this enabled him to devote his spare time to composing. ; 4 Tchaikovsky’s subsequent career consisted of the production of huge amounts of quality music interspersed with nervous breakdowns. He was an extremely emotional person and suffered from numerous neuroses. For example, he was convinced that if he conducted an orchestra, his head would fall off. On the rare occasions when he had to conduct, he held his chin with his left hand throughout the performance. In later years he seems to have got over this particular phobia. Tchaikovsky was also a secret homosexual. At the time in Russia, this was considered a terrible crime and if found out, he would be stripped of all his possessions and deported to a Siberian labor camp. In 1876 he was approached by Antonina Milyukova, a former fellow student, who was quite cle