User:Smerus/xscar

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Tchaikovsky, Pyotr Il'yich [Chaykovsky, Pyotr Il'ich]
(b nr Votkinsk, north-eastern Russia, 25 April/7 May 1840; d St Petersburg, 25 Oct/6 Nov 1893). Russian composer. Of his ten finished operas, nine survive complete and one survives in two versions. In sheer size his operatic legacy was exceeded by those of two of his countrymen, his teacher Anton Rubinstein and his near-contemporary Rimsky-Korsakov; but Tchaikovsky's is a more varied corpus than theirs. While his main historical influence was as a composer of instrumental music, in terms of enduring representation in the world repertory Tchaikovsky is surely the pre-eminent Russian operatic composer, despite an eclecticism of subject matter and style that has impeded critical acceptance of his work, especially in the West.