From the archives: Tchaikovsky, remembered
In 1893 The Omaha Bee carried a St. Petersburg cable that the Russian composer had died.
On the anniversary of a notable death, Omaha Commons revisits how newspapers of the time reported it.
OMAHA — On Nov. 7, 1893, The Omaha Daily Bee printed a cable from St. Petersburg dated Nov. 6: the Russian composer Tchaikovsky was dead.
The brief notice said he was born May 5, 1840, and that he was among the Russian school’s artists best known abroad. It offered a sharp aside that he sometimes lacked originality and borrowed from other composers — a contemporary judgment, not a later biography.
The same cable said his death was due to cholera after he drank unboiled water at a restaurant a few days earlier, and that the czar expressed great regret.
The Bee put the item among its foreign cables. It did not add Omaha reaction, a funeral notice or a longer career sketch.
Source: Omaha Daily Bee, Nov. 7, 1893, page 1, via Nebraska Newspapers / University of Nebraska-Lincoln (Public Domain Mark 1.0).
How we checked this: Reported from the Omaha Daily Bee of Nov. 7, 1893, page 1 (OCR and page HTML), opened Nov. 6, 2026, about 5:50 a.m. CT; rights line on the page reads Public Domain Mark 1.0. loc.gov / Chronicling America Monitor and collection pages returned HTTP 403 on two tries this morning.