“ ... The night has been glorious! At 2 a.m. I reluctantly left my place by the window. The moon shone brightly. The stillness, the perfume of the flowers, and those wondrous indefinable sounds that belong to the night—ah God, how beautiful it all is! Dear friend, I am glad you are at Interlaken, of which I am very fond; but all the same I do not envy you. It would be hard to find a place in which the conditions of life would conform better to my ideal than Simaki. All day long I feel as though I were lost in some wonderful, fantastic dream.”
To N. F. von Meck.
“Simaki, July 14th (26th), 1880.
“I have just been playing the first act of The Maid of Orleans, which is now ready for the printer. Either I am mistaken, or it is not in vain, dear friend, that you have had the clock you gave me decorated with the figure of my latest operatic heroine. I do not think The Maid of Orleans my finest, or the most emotional, of my works, but it seems to me to be the one most likely to make my name popular. I believe Oniegin and one or two of my instrumental works are far more closely allied to my individual temperament. I was less absorbed in The Maid of Orleans than in our Symphony, for instance, or the second Quartet; but I gave more consideration to the scenic and musical effects—and these are the most important things in opera.”
To N. F. von Meck.
“Simaki, July 18th (30th), 1880.
“Yesterday evening—to take a rest from my own work—I played through Bizet’s Carmen from cover to cover. I consider it a chef d’œuvre in the fullest sense of the word: one of those rare compositions which seems to reflect most strongly in itself the musical tendencies of a whole generation. It seems to me that our own period differs from earlier ones in this one characteristic: that contemporary composers are engaged in the pursuit of charming and piquant effects, unlike Mozart, Beethoven, Schubert, and Schumann. What is the so-called New Russian School but the cult of varied and pungent harmonies, of original orchestral combinations and every kind of purely external effect? Musical ideas give place to this or that union of sounds. Formerly there was composition, creation; now (with few exceptions) there is only research and invention. This development of musical thought is naturally purely intellectual, consequently contemporary music is clever, piquant, and eccentric; but cold and lacking the glow of true emotion. And behold, a Frenchman comes on the scene, in whom these qualities of piquancy and pungency are not the outcome of effort and reflection, but flow from his pen as in a free stream, flattering the ear, but touching us also. It is as though he said to us: ‘You ask nothing great, superb, or grandiose—you want something pretty, here is a pretty opera;’ and truly I know of nothing in music which is more representative of that element which I call the pretty (le joli).... I cannot play the last scene without tears in my eyes; the gross rejoicings of the crowd who look on at the bull-fight, and, side by side with this, the poignant tragedy and death of the two principal characters, pursued by an evil fate, who come to their inevitable end through a long series of sufferings.
“I am convinced that ten years hence Carmen will be the most popular opera in the world. But no one is a prophet in his own land. In Paris Carmen has had no real success.”
To Modeste Tchaikovsky.
“Simaki, July 18th (30th), 1880.