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Tchaikovsky’s professional training in music began with a theory class in the autumn of 1861. Although he kept his official post, his desire to study music had become urgent. His first teacher was Nikolay Zaremba, a naturalized Pole with German pedagogy and an adherent of Beethoven’s late style. When denied a promotion in the civil service, Tchaikovsky applied in the summer of 1862 to enter the Russian Musical Society’s new ‘music school’. The St Petersburg Conservatory opened on 8/20 October 1862 – Russia’s 1000th birthday – and Tchaikovsky graduated from it at the end of 1865. We know of Tchaikovsky at the conservatory from the recollections of his classmates, especially Herman Laroche, whose accounts are canonic. Without Laroche and Fanny Dürbach, we would have virtually no eyewitness knowledge of Tchaikovsky before the age of 26.

In addition to theory and composition, Tchaikovsky studied the piano, flute and organ. His principal teacher was Anton Rubinstein, who was pleased with Tchaikovsky the student but later resisted acknowledging a compositional gift superior to his own. Tchaikovsky disdained Rubinstein the composer but yielded to his personality and learnt from him about discipline: sketch quickly to the end of a work, then score; work every day, and hold to music as a sacred calling.

The mystery of Tchaikovsky’s conservatory period is how he matured so quickly. In composition he progressed from student exercises to works of distinction: by graduation his Characteristic Dances (now lost) had been conducted by Johann Strauss (ii), and a string quartet movement, a concert overture, and his graduation cantata, to the words of Schiller’s An die Freude, had been heard in public. His remarkable sensitivity to words had also flourished, in his devotion to literature and love of theatre, his striving for elegant exposition (including poetry), and his translation of F.-A. Gevaert’s Traité général d’instrumentation, published just...