“August 1st (13th), 1891.

“ ... I have received your letter and the songs, and played through the latter. I have nothing new to add to what I have already said as to your remarkable creative gifts. It is useless to lament that circumstances have not enabled you to go through a course of strict counterpoint, which you specially needed. This goes without saying. Your resolve to confine yourself entirely to song-writing does not please me. A true artist, even if he possesses only a limited creative capacity, which hinders him from producing great works in certain spheres of art, should still keep the highest aim in view. Neither age, nor any other obstacle, should check his ambition. Why should you suppose one needs less than a complete all-round technique in order to compose a perfect song? With an imperfect technique you may limit your sphere of work as much as you please—you will never get beyond an elegant amateurism.... I dislike the system of putting the date of composition on each song. What is the use of it? What does it matter to the public when and where a work was composed?”

About August 20th Tchaikovsky left home for Kamenka, from whence he went on to stay with his brother Nicholas. Here he met his favourite poet, A. Fet, and became very friendly with him. Fet wrote a poem, “To Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky,” an attention which touched the musician very deeply. At the end of August he returned to Moscow in a very contented frame of mind.

XIV
1891-1892

Through September, and the greater part of October, Tchaikovsky remained at Maidanovo, working uninterruptedly upon the opera Iolanthe and the orchestration of The Voyevode. The work went easily, and his health was good. The evenings, which during the last years of his life brought home to him a sense of his loneliness, were enlivened by the presence of Laroche, who was staying in the house. The friends played arrangements for four hands, or Laroche read aloud. Everything seemed so ordered as to leave no room for dissatisfaction with his lot; and yet his former contentment with his surroundings had vanished.

The theft of his clock was still a matter of anxiety. He might have partially forgotten it, had not the police announced the capture of the criminal. “I am living in the atmosphere of one of Gaboriau’s novels,” he wrote to his brother. “The police have caught the criminal, and he has confessed. But nothing will induce him to reveal where he has hidden the clock. To-day he was brought to me in the hopes that I might persuade him to tell the truth.... He said he would confess all, if he was left alone with me. We went into the next room. There he flung himself at my feet and implored forgiveness. Of course I forgave him, and only begged him to say where the clock was. Then he became very quiet and afterwards declared he had never stolen it at all!... You can imagine how all this has upset me, and how it has set me against Maidanovo.”

Another cause of his passing discontent was wounded pride. So far he believed himself to have scored a great success in America; he was convinced that his return was anxiously waited, and that his popularity had greatly increased. One day, however, he received a letter from Morris Reno, who had originally engaged him, offering him a three months’ tour with twenty concerts at a fee of 4,000 dollars. Seeing that on the first occasion he had received 2,400 dollars for four concerts, Tchaikovsky immediately concluded that he had greatly overrated the importance of his previous visit, and was deeply mortified in consequence. He telegraphed in reply to Reno two words only: “Non. Tchaikovsky.” Afterwards he came to recognise that there was nothing offensive in the proposal made to him, and that it in no way denoted any falling off in the appreciation of the Americans. But the desire to return was no longer so keen; only a very substantial pecuniary advantage would have induced him to undertake the voyage.

Finally, he had another reason for feeling somewhat depressed at this moment. The will which he made in the month of September involuntarily caused him to think of that “flat-nosed horror,” which was sometimes his equivalent for death. He had hitherto been under the impression that the law which existed before the accession of Alexander III. was still in force, and that at his death all his rights in his operas would pass into the hands of the Theatrical Direction. The discovery that he had more than a life interest in them was the reason for making a will. It proves how much attention Tchaikovsky must have given to his contracts for Eugene Oniegin, Mazeppa, and the later operas before signing them, since the clause relating to his hereditary rights was prominent in them all. When his brother Modeste called his attention to the fact, he would not believe him until he had inquired from the Direction, when he found himself agreeably mistaken. He was always anxious as to the fate of certain people whom he supported during his lifetime, and was thankful to feel that this assistance would be continued after his death.

The number of those he assisted continually increased. “I was the most expensive pensioner,” says Modeste Tchaikovsky, “for he allowed me about two thousand roubles a year.” But he always met every request for money half-way. Here are a few specimens of his generosity, quoted from letters to Jurgenson and others:—

“Dear Friend,—I want to help X. in some way. You are selling the tickets for his concert. Should they go badly, take fifteen or twenty places on my behalf and give them to whomsoever you please. Of course, X. must know nothing about it.”