, and even hallucinations; and so painful was the whole experience that he never again composed at night. Of more importance is the vivid example his symphony give us of the contrast between his passionately narrow attitude in personal relations and his magnanimity and candour whenever he could get away from that stifling atmosphere into the free air of impersonal art. His eager wish for a performance of the symphony in St. Petersburg, where his works had so far been badly received, was peremptorily refused by his old teacher, Anton Rubinstein. Here was the kind of slight that any composer finds hard, but above all a morbidly shy man like Peter Ilyich, which his easily hurt pride. "This was the last straw," writes Evans-"he never forgave Anton Rubinstein-he included din his dislike of the Directors of the Music Society, the Press and even St. Petersburg public. It was the last time he asked to have a work performed there." And no doubt this "complex," as a psychologist would be justified in calling it, was intensified by the great success of the symphony, a year later, in Moscow, when the young composer was called unexpectedly to the stage-terribly nervous, carelessly dressed, holding his hat in his hand, and making clumsy bows. So much for the personal side. Now for the impersonal. Decades later, hardly more than a year before his death, he was asked for his memories of Rubinstein. "In him," he wrote in answer, "I adore not only a great pianist and composer but a man of rare nobility, frank, loyal, generous, incapable of petty and vulgar sentiments . . . a man who towered far above the common herd. . . . I took him an overture,The Storm, guilty of all kinds of whims of form and orchestration. He was hurt, and said that it was not for the development of imbeciles that he took the trouble to teach composition. I left the Conservatory full of gratitude for my professor." Those who patronizingly regard Tchaikovsky as a neurotic will do wel...
