This book is a charming account of Tchaikovsky's only visit to America--a trip he made to New York in 1891 to participate in the opening of Carnegie Hall. Told largely in Tchaikovsky's own words--making use of his letters and diary--it is at once a revealing psychological portrait of the great Russian composer and a rich picture of New York cultural life at the end of the last century.

Eleven-year-old Jenny, whose family came from Russia to America to start a new life, meets the famous Russian composer on his 1891 trip to the New World and writes about it in her diary.

This book is a charming account of Tchaikovsky's only visit to America--a trip he made to New York in 1891 to participate in the opening of Carnegie Hall. Told largely in Tchaikovsky's own words--making use of his letters and diary--it is at once a revealing psychological portrait of the great Russian composer and a rich picture of New York cultural life at the end of the last century.

A story about Tchaikovsky on a grand tour of America filled with exceprts of Tchaikovsky's music and a musical mosaic of well-known American music including ragtime, spirituals and popular folk classics.

A thrilling new biography of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky--composer of some of the world's most popular orchestral and theatrical music "A lively, argumentative and thoughtful reflection on one of the 19th century's most important musical figures."--Michael O'Donnell, Wall Street Journal Tchaikovsky is famous for all the wrong reasons. Portrayed as a hopeless romantic, a suffering melancholic, or a morbid obsessive, the Tchaikovsky we think we know is a shadow of the fascinating reality. It is all too easy to forget that he composed an empire's worth of music, and navigated the imperial Russian court to great advantage. In this iconoclastic biography, celebrated author Simon Morrison re-creates Tchaikovsky's complex world. His life and art were framed by Russian national ambition, and his work was the emanation of an imperial subject: kaleidoscopic, capacious, cosmopolitan, decentred. Morrison reexamines the relationship between Tchaikovsky's music, personal life, and politics; his support of Tsars Alexander II and III; and his engagement with the cultures of the imperial margins, in Ukraine, Poland, and the Caucasus. Tchaikovsky's Empire unsettles everything we thought we knew--and gives us a vivid new appreciation of Russia's most popular composer.

America was a source of fascination to Europeans arriving there during the course of the nineteenth century. At first glance, the New World was very similar to the societies they left behind in their native countries, but in many aspects of politics, culture and society, the American experience was vastly different - almost unrecognisably so - from Old World Europe. Europeans were astounded that America could survive without a monarch, a standing army and the hierarchical society which still dominated Europe. Some travellers, such as the actress Fanny Kemble, were truly convinced America would eventually revert to a monarchy; others, such as Frances Wright and even Oscar Wilde, took their opinions further, and attempted to fix aspects of America - described in 1827 by the young Scottish captain Basil Hall, as 'one of England's "occasional failures"'. Many prominent visitors to the United States recorded their responses to this emerging society in their diaries, letters and journals; and many of them, like the fulminating Frances Trollope, were brutally and offensively honest in their accounts of the New World. They provide an insight into an America which is barely recognizable today whilst their writings set down a diverse and lively assortment of personal travel accounts. This book compares the impressions of a group of discerning and prominent Europeans from the cultural sphere - from the writers Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and Oscar Wilde to luminaries of music and theatre such as Tchaikovsky and Fanny Kemble. Their reactions to the New World are as revealing of the European and American worlds as they are colourful and varied, providing a unique insight into the experiences of nineteenth century travelers to America.