“Kamenka, June 23rd (July 5th), 1880.
“Dear Soul,—I believe you imagine I have no greater happiness than to compose occasional pieces to be played at forthcoming exhibitions, and that I ought to put my inspirations down post-haste upon paper, without knowing how, when, or where. I shall not stir a finger until I get a positive commission. If something vocal is required of me, I must be supplied with a suitable text (when it is a question of an order I am ready to set an advertisement of corn-plasters to music); if it is to be an instrumental work, I must have some idea of the form it should take, and what it is intended to illustrate. At the same time a definite fee must be offered, with a definite agreement as to who is responsible for it, and when I shall receive it. I do not make all these demands from caprice, but because I am not in a position to write these festival works without having some positive instructions as to what is required of me. There are two kinds of inspiration: one comes direct from the soul, by freedom of choice, or other creative impulse; the other comes to order.... Matters of business must be put very clearly and distinctly. Fancy if I had already been inspired to write a Festival Overture for the opening of the Exhibition! What would have come of it? It might have happened that the great Anton had also (An-)toned something of his own. Where should I have been with my scribblings?
“I shall finish the corrections of the fourth act to-day. The opera (The Maid of Orleans) has become a long affair. My poor publisher! Well, we must live in hope!”
Early in July Tchaikovsky visited Nadejda von Meck’s estate at Brailov, for the sake of repose. At this time a feeling of dissatisfaction with his work seems to have taken possession of him. “I have written much that is beautiful,” he wrote to his brother Modeste, “but how weak, how lacking in mastery!... I have made up my mind to write nothing new for a time, but to devote myself to the correcting and re-editing of my earlier works.”
A letter to Nadejda von Meck, dated Brailov, July 5th (17th), 1880, contains some interesting comments upon Glinka and his work.
“ ... Glinka is quite an unusual phenomenon! Reading his Memoirs, which reveal a nice, amiable, but rather commonplace man, we can hardly realise that the same mind created that wonderful ‘Slavsia,’[78] which is worthy to rank with the work of the greatest geniuses. And how many more fine things there are in his other opera (Russlan) and the overtures! How astonishingly original is his Komarinskaya, from which all the Russian composers who followed him (including myself) continue to this day to borrow contrapuntal and harmonic combinations directly they have to develop a Russian dance-tune! This is done unconsciously; but the fact is, Glinka managed to concentrate in one short work what a dozen second-rate talents would only have invented with the whole expenditure of their powers.
“And it was this same Glinka who, at the height of his maturity, composed such a weak, trivial thing as the Polonaise for the Coronation (written a year before his death), or the children’s polka, of which he speaks in his Memoirs at such length, and with such self-satisfaction, as though it had been a masterpiece.
“Mozart, too, expresses himself with great naïveté in his letters to his father and, in fact, all through his life. But this was a different kind of simplicity. Mozart is a genius whose childlike innocence, gentleness of spirit and virginal modesty are scarcely of this earth. He was devoid of self-satisfaction and boastfulness; he seems hardly to have been conscious of the greatness of his genius. Glinka, on the contrary, is imbued with a spirit of self-glorification; he is ready to become garrulous over the most trivial events in his life, or the appearance of his least important works, and is convinced it is all of historical importance. Glinka is a gifted Russian aristocrat of his time, and has the faults of his type: petty vanity, limited culture, intolerance, ostentatiousness and a morbid sensibility to, and impatience of, all criticism. These are generally the characteristics of mediocrity; how they come to exist in a man who ought—so it seems—to dwell in calm and modest pride, conscious of his power, is beyond my comprehension! In one page of his Memoirs Glinka says he had a bulldog whose conduct was not irreproachable, and his servant had to be continually cleaning the room. Kukolnik, to whom Glinka entrusted his Memoirs for revision, remarked in the margin, ‘Why put in this?’ Glinka pencilled underneath, ‘Why not?’ Is not this highly characteristic? Yet, all the same, he composed the ‘Slavsia’!”
To N. F. von Meck.
“Brailov, July 6th (18th), 1880.