On the night of May 5, 1891, enthusiastic New Yorkers cheered a good orchestra and its conductor, a shy-mannered man with a most winning smile and the saddest of eyes. The occasion was the festival opening of Carnegie Hall. The music was Marche Solennelle, by Russia's famous composer Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky. The conductor was Tchaikovsky himself.

Tchaikovsky slipped away from the bewildering country of the United States as quietly as he had come, glad to return to the peace of his little home in Klin, near Moscow. Only one great work remained to be written before he would lay down his pen for the last time. One great work more—his sixth symphony, the Pathétique—but what a wealth of beauty his pen had already set down on neat pages: The Concerto for Piano, in B Flat Minor, with its vigorous, sweeping chords, somber Eugene Oniegin, most successful of his eleven operas, the whimsical Nutcracker Suite, the elfin Swan Lake music, the delicate and fantastic Sleeping Beauty Ballet, frenzied Manfred, impassioned Francesca da Rimini, the Romeo and Juliet Overture, with all the poignancy of its youth and tragedy, the gentle Lullaby of the Children's Songs. In scores of such works Tchaikovksy recorded with the truth of great art the yearnings, the fears, the joys, and the sorrows of the human heart. 

Born in 1840, he was forced to live all his life in a world torn by wars and violent revolutions; in a country of medieval backwardness under the Tsars, where serfs bound to the soil worked out their lives in misery and degradation, where political prisoners were an endless caravan on the road to Siberia. Through hard work and unrelenting struggle this man of many weaknesses, of unstable nervous system, of proud, sensitive spirit, rose superior to his environment, achieving victory as an artist over what was mean and slothful in himself, over what was mean and sordid in his surroundings. This is a story of vast horizons, with roots reaching back to antiquity, to the days when the Slavs dwelt peacefully in their wooden villages and tilled their fields and sang their plaintive songs. It goes back and forth when the Golden Hordes of the Asiatic Khans swarmed across the mountains to bend the proud Muscovites to their will. 

Out of this rich heritage of the past, out of old wrongs and woes and joys and of peoples grown used to the harsh freedom of the endless steppes, came a rich musical talent, a blending of the color, the fatalism, the passion of the Eastern peoples, the brooding melancholy of the Slavs, the harsh, uncompromising, lusty temper of the Vikings. This was Tchaikovsky's heritage. The beauties of the ancient culture, the folk rhythms and harmonies of the old songs—these musical treasures his amazing talent brought forth for Western ears to hear. He, the most Russian of composers, was able at long last to bring the East to the West. 

From the book