We interrupt the Tchaikovsky orgy...

...that is, the frenzy around the Charlotte Symphony's all-Tchaikovsky concert March 30-31, Opera Carolina's "Eugene Onegin" March 17-25, N.C. Dance Theatre's "Sleeping Beauty" (which runs now through March 18) and various other events. Herewith, four factoids you may not encounter in the PR blitz:

1) He was a bad judge of his own abilities. While writing "Yolanta," the opera he wrongly thought would be embraced by future generations, he told a friend he was also working on a ballet of no consequence. It was "The Nutcracker."

2) His first piano concerto, probably the most popular in the classical repertoire, was a dud in Russian circles. His friend and mentor, Nikolai Rubenstein, deemed it unplayable: "There are only two or three pages that can be salvaged, and the rest must be thrown away." No Russians wanted to play or conduct it, so Tchaikovsky had to wait until a German conductor, Hans von Bulow, premiered it in Boston.

3) Speaking of Germans, Tchaikovsky hated Brahms. Called him "a giftless bastard" whose unemotional, tradition-bound writing had no merit. (That's unfair, of course.) Each may have been the last great Romantic composer in his country, but Tchaikovsky had zero empathy for old Johannes.

4) Tchaikovsky may have whacked himself. The jury's still out as to whether he got cholera from drinking untreated water during an epidemic or committed suicide at the behest of an informal tribunal, held after he began an affair with a member of the tsar's royal circle. (And, of course, the infected water could have been his way of doing that.) Whichever answer is correct, he died a wizened, white-haired, worn-out genius, looking far older than his age of 53.