These days I dream of setting in a village not far from Moscow where I can feel at home."
Frist he rented a small house in the village of Maidanovo. But Maidanovo was too full of tourists in the summer, and Tchaikovsky had too many visitors, when what he wanted was peace and quiet. Eventually he found the perfect house, in the small town of Klin. It was 85 kilometres northwest of Moscow and he lived there until his death on 6 November 1893. It is the place where hr wrote his last major work, his 6th Symphony, or the Pathetique as it is sometimes called.
It's agrey wooden house with a green roof. Tchaikovsky's servant Alexei lived on the ground floor, and the kitchen and dining room were on the first floor. Tchaikovsky himself lived on the second floor. The sitting room and study, where his piano is located, is the largest room in the house and there is a fireplace and a bookcase with his music books. His writing desk, where he wrote letters every morning after breakfast, is at the end of the room. But the place where he composed music was in his bedroom, on a plain, unpainted table overlooking the garden.
In his final year, Tchaikovsky's great love was his garden. It was not a tidy English-style garden, but more like a forest. He adored flowers, particularly lilies of the valley, and after his death, his brother Modest, who had decided to turn the house into a museum, planted thousands of lilies of the valley around the garden.
In 1917, after the Bolshevik revolution, an anarchist named Doroshenko lived there with his family. People say that he fired shots at the portrait of Pope Innocent hanging in one of the bedrooms. He was finally arrested in April, and the house became the property of the state.
Sine 1958, the winners of the annual International Tchaikovsky Competition have all been invited to come to Klin to play his piano, and there is a tradition that each musician plants a tree in his garden in the hope that, like his music, it will remain beautiful forever.