Composer. Pyotr Tchaikovsky was a prolific 19th-century Russian composer who has been recognized as one of the most popular all-time composers in the world. He composed seven symphonies, 11 operas, three ballets, five suites, three piano concertos, a violin concerto, 11 overtures, four cantatas, 20 choral works, three string quartets, a string sextet, and more than 100 songs and piano pieces. Many of his pieces have held the test of time and are performed in the 21st century. Born one of six siblings in Kama-Votkinsk, Vyatka Guberniya, in the Ural Mountains of the Russian Empire, he began piano studies at age five and, before he was ten, could read and write French and German. His early musical talents were well-noted. In 1850, he was sent to an all-male school, the Imperial School of Jurisprudence in St. Petersburg, and after graduation in June of 1859, and with his father's support, he was appointed as a clerk in the Ministry of Justice. In 1862, he resigned and enrolled in the newly founded Saint Petersburg Conservatory as one of the school's first students. By 1866, he had relocated to Moscow to accept a professor of harmony position at the Conservatorium of Music in Moscow. With all being well-received, his first symphony, "Winter Daydreams," was performed in Moscow in 1868, his first opera, "The Voyevoda," in 1868, and his second symphony, "Little Russian," in 1872. After retiring from the Conservatory following mental health issues in 1877, one of his best-known ballets, "Lebedinoe Ozero" or "Swan Lake, debuted at the Moscow Imperial Bolshoi Theatre. Although for years, there had been questions about his sexual orientation, in the summer of 1877, he married Antonina Milyukova, a young and naive music student, who had declared her love for him. With homosexuality being illegal in Russia, any mention of his intimate lifestyle was censored in Russia to protect his career. The marriage was over in less than three months, leaving him again mentally and emotionally drained and unable to work. The details of this time are well-documented in his younger brother Modest's three-volume 1902 biography "The Life of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky," along with his own letters being published at a later date. After that experience, Tchaikovsky lived as a bachelor for most of his life. He came under the thirteen-year patronage of Madame Nadezhda von Meck, who gave him a yearly allowance, which allowed him to devote his time to composition. Although he never met her physically, his fourth symphony was dedicated to Madame von Meck. From 1878 to 1885, Tchaikovsky traveled extensively and was well-regarded in Europe as well as in Russia. He presented the "1812 Overture" in 1880. After Nikolai Rubinstein's 1881 death, he composed "Trio in A minor, Op 50", a piano piece "dedicated to the memory of a great artist." In 1893, this piece was used as part of his own funeral. In 1888, Russian Tsar Alexander Alexandrovitch Romanov III granted him a yearly pension. His highly-regarded ballets, "The Sleeping Beauty" and the Christmastime favorite, "The Nutcracker," debuted in 1890 and 1891, respectively. A few days after conducting the premiere of his Sixth Symphony, "Pathétique," Tchaikovsky reportedly died of cholera as his mother did. In the 1980s, many scholars stated that his death was, in fact, a suicide, which was caused by deliberately drinking a glass of contaminated water during a cholera epidemic or ingesting a poison. He was elected in 1892, and sculptor Mark Matveyevich Antokolsky were the only Russians in the French Academy of Fine Arts. In 1893 he was awarded an honorary doctorate degree in music from Cambridge University in the United Kingdom.