About this episode
2 Ghost sound
I am most happy, to be here, and as a ghost, my heart carries the weight of a funeral march, even in moments of applause.
Interesting analogy, Maestro Tchaikovsky, but could you tell us a bit about your earthly background?
Ah, yes… earthly my background. I was born in 1840, in a small Russian town nestled in the Ural Mountains. My father was an engineer in the mines, my mother of French ancestry, gentle but distant. Music was not the profession expected of me — Russia had no conservatory system then, no path for a composer. I was meant to become a civil servant, a reliable bureaucrat in the machinery of empire.
What were your feelings about music as a young person?
Ah music… music was in my blood. Even as a boy I could hear it whispering everywhere — in the birch forests, in the peasant songs that drifted on the wind, in the melancholy of Russian church bells. I studied law and served dutifully in the Ministry of Justice, but my heart withered there. When the Saint Petersburg Conservatory opened, I knew I must leave behind the safety of that life and risk everything for composition.
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