Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky Trivia
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60 free Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky trivia questions with answers — music quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky trivia quiz covers the composer of Swan Lake, The Nutcracker, the 1812 Overture and the Pathétique. The easy questions cover the nationality, the ballets, the cannon-firing overture, the patroness he never met and the mysterious death at 53. From there it moves through the life: the French governess, the piano lessons at five, the law school in Saint Petersburg, the three years at the Ministry of Justice, the first conservatory class, the professorship at 50 rubles a month, the disastrous marriage of 1877 and the thirteen-year correspondence with Nadezhda von Meck. The harder end covers the Mighty Handful, Nikolai Rubinstein's tantrum over the First Piano Concerto, the operas he burned, the Order of Saint Vladimir, the pension from the Tsar, the Carnegie Hall opening, the Cambridge doctorate, the critic who said his Violin Concerto 'stinks', the whole-tone scale, and the cemetery where he lies beside Borodin and Mussorgsky. Every answer was checked against Tchaikovsky's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our Nutcracker and classical music quizzes are the natural next stop.
30 of 60 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01In which town in the Russian Empire was Tchaikovsky born in 1840?
Votkinsk
Votkinsk, where his father managed the ironworks, was his home for only eight years: his father retired in 1848 and the family left that autumn.
Q 02To which musical period does Tchaikovsky belong?
The Romantic
The Romantic era prized personal feeling, and Tchaikovsky's tuneful, open-hearted melodies were written to stir it, which is why his music remains among the most popular of any composer's.
Q 03Family legend says Tchaikovsky's Cossack great-grandfather Fyodor Chaika fought at which decisive battle of 1709?
Poltava
Poltava is where family tradition placed the Cossack Fyodor Chaika; the family later lengthened Chaika, the Slavic word for gull, into Tchaikovsky.
Q 04In his fifties Tchaikovsky travelled to France to visit Fanny Dürbach, who had been what to him?
His governess
His governess from 1844 to 1848, Fanny Dürbach kept his childhood exercise books and letters for decades, and her memories supplied many of the stories told about his early years.
Q 05Tchaikovsky began piano lessons at five and soon knew which composer's music?
Chopin
Chopin's mazurkas came his way in those first years at the piano; a year before the lessons began, aged four, he had made his first recorded attempt at composing, a song written with his little sister.
Q 06Which self-playing instrument first brought Bellini and Donizetti to the young Tchaikovsky?
An orchestrion
An orchestrion is a barrel organ built to imitate an orchestra; his supportive parents bought it and hired a tutor, yet at ten they sent him away to boarding school in the capital.
Q 07Seeing no future in music, Tchaikovsky's parents sent him to boarding school at ten to train for which career?
Civil servant
Civil servant was the safe choice: Russia then had no conservatories, so he spent nine years at the Imperial School of Jurisprudence and became a government clerk at 19.
Q 08Which nickname belongs to Tchaikovsky's Sixth Symphony, which he premiered just nine days before his death?
Pathétique
Pathétique was heard only once in his lifetime: the symphony's second performance, three weeks after the premiere, was at a concert in his memory.
Q 09Which newly invented instrument gives the Sugar Plum Fairy her tinkling sound in Tchaikovsky's The Nutcracker?
The celesta
The celesta, patented in Paris in 1886, was still a novelty when Tchaikovsky first tried it, in a little-known symphonic ballad the year before the ballet made its sound famous.
Q 10Tchaikovsky's opera The Queen of Spades is based on a story by which writer?
Alexander Pushkin
Alexander Pushkin's tale of a man undone by a dead countess and her secret of three winning cards became the opera, which Tchaikovsky composed in just 44 days in Florence.
Q 11Which pianist and composer co-founded the Russian Musical Society and taught Tchaikovsky composition?
Anton Rubinstein
Anton Rubinstein admired his pupil's gifts but distrusted his modern streak: when Tchaikovsky submitted his First Symphony for performance in Saint Petersburg, his old teacher turned it down.
Q 12Tchaikovsky's conservatory thesis, which won a silver medal, was a cantata on which text?
Schiller's 'Ode to Joy'
Schiller's 'Ode to Joy' is the poem Beethoven set in his Ninth Symphony; Tchaikovsky's setting earned him his medal, yet a leading nationalist critic lambasted it in the press as feeble.
Q 13At the brand-new Moscow Conservatory in 1866, the freshly graduated Tchaikovsky was hired to teach which subject?
Q 21Which Gogol story is the basis of Tchaikovsky's prize-winning opera Vakula the Smith?
Christmas Eve
Christmas Eve won over the jury but not the public; Tchaikovsky reworked the opera years later under a new title, and Rimsky-Korsakov set the same tale in 1895.
Q 22In 1877 Tchaikovsky married which former student, who had written to declare her love, only to flee within weeks?
Antonina Miliukova
Antonina Miliukova remained his legal wife until he died, because she refused every request for a divorce; he fled abroad within weeks of the wedding and never lived with her again.
Q 23Which Belgian soprano was Tchaikovsky briefly engaged to in 1868?
Désirée Artôt
Music theory
Music theory was a chore to teach, he found, and in 1878 a patron's allowance let him resign from the conservatory to compose full-time.
Q 14Which famous conductor led the first public performance of a Tchaikovsky work, his Characteristic Dances, in 1865?
Johann Strauss II
Johann Strauss II, Vienna's 'Waltz King', conducted the piece at a summer concert in Pavlovsk; its composer, still a student, only heard the news after returning to Saint Petersburg.
Q 15Which composer's opera did Tchaikovsky, writing home in 1876, call incredible nonsense with flashes of extraordinary beauty?
Richard Wagner
Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold opened the first Bayreuth festival in 1876. Tchaikovsky, there as a critic, was captivated by the staging but left cold by the music.
Q 16What was the nationalist group of five Russian composers with whom Tchaikovsky had a mixed relationship?
The Mighty Handful
The Mighty Handful gathered around Mily Balakirev and distrusted conservatory training, which left the conservatory-trained Tchaikovsky caught between Russia's two musical camps.
Q 17On which work, his first recognised masterpiece, did Tchaikovsky collaborate with Balakirev in 1869?
Romeo and Juliet
Romeo and Juliet took shape under Balakirev's coaching and only after two radical revisions; it became the first Tchaikovsky work to enter the international repertoire.
Q 18Which pianist premiered Tchaikovsky's First Piano Concerto after a Moscow colleague savaged it?
Hans von Bülow
Hans von Bülow gave the premiere in Boston in 1875, an ocean away from Moscow; the colleague who had torn the concerto apart later withdrew his criticism and became its champion.
Q 19What did Tchaikovsky do with the manuscripts of his first two operas, The Voyevoda and Undina?
Destroyed them
Destroyed them, though not for good: after his death The Voyevoda was pieced back together from the orchestral parts used at its premiere.
Q 20Tchaikovsky's opera The Oprichnik is set among the feared personal guard of which Russian ruler?
Ivan the Terrible
Ivan the Terrible's oprichniks carried out his repressions in 16th-century Moscow. Tchaikovsky wrote the libretto himself and lifted almost the whole opening scene from his first opera.
Désirée Artôt left Moscow on tour and in 1869 married a Spanish baritone from her own company instead; Tchaikovsky only heard the news second-hand.
Q 24Nadezhda von Meck, Tchaikovsky's long-time patroness, was the widow of a tycoon in which industry?
Railways
Railways made her husband a multimillionaire, and his widow spent the fortune on music: besides funding Tchaikovsky, she hired the young Claude Debussy to play in her household.
Q 25What unusual condition governed Tchaikovsky's relationship with Nadezhda von Meck?
They agreed never to meet
They agreed never to meet and, bar a wordless chance encounter or two, kept to it through more than a decade of letters, even after her son married his niece.
Q 26Which opera did Tchaikovsky finish abroad early in 1878, in the months after fleeing his marriage?
Eugene Onegin
Eugene Onegin was finished in the same burst as the Fourth Symphony and the Violin Concerto, paid for by a patron's allowance that let him roam Europe instead of teaching.
Q 27The 1812 Overture, a Fourth of July favourite, marks Russia's defeat of which invader?
Napoleon
Napoleon's failed 1812 invasion is the subject; Tchaikovsky wrote the piece to order in about six weeks and predicted it would be 'very loud and noisy', with little artistic merit.
Q 28The score of Tchaikovsky's 1812 Overture famously calls for which weapons to be fired in the finale?
Cannon
Cannon need not be real: Tchaikovsky's own note asked for the stage device theatres used to imitate a shot, and indoor performances often make do with a bass drum.
Q 29Which friend, director of the Moscow Conservatory, is the 'great artist' mourned in the dedication of Tchaikovsky's Piano Trio?
Nikolai Rubinstein
Nikolai Rubinstein died in Paris in 1881. A year earlier Tchaikovsky had refused his patroness a piano trio, saying he disliked the combination; grief changed his mind, and it is the only one he wrote.
Q 30Tchaikovsky's tone poem Francesca da Rimini depicts a pair of doomed lovers from which medieval poem?
Dante's Inferno
Dante's Inferno gripped him on a train journey: he read the canto about Francesca and, as he wrote to his brother, was seized with a desire to turn it into a symphonic poem.