l to ask themselves how many artists there have ever been who would be capable of such a disinterested detachment. But he goes further. "I have always regarded him," he continues, "as the greatest of artists and the noblest of men, but I shall never become his friend. . . . It would be difficult to explain the reason. I think my amour propre as a composer has a great deal to do with it. in my youth I was impatient to make my way. . . . Painful as it is, I must confess that he did nothing, absolutely nothing, to forward my plans. The most probably explanation of this mortifying luke-warmness is that Rubinstein does not care for my music, that my musical temperament is antipathetic to him. [ Tchaikovsky's own italics.] "I still see him from time to time," ends the letter, "and always with pleasure. At the time of his jubilee I had the happiness of going through much trouble and fatigue for him. . . . If I have told too little it is not my fault, nor that of Anton, but of fatality." Another letter equally lovable in its magnanimity is the long one-to long to quote here-of Jan. 5 1878, to his benefactress, Nadejda von Meck, about the Russian Nationalists or Kutschka (literally "Bunch") of St. Petersburg, placed by circumstances and to some extent by tastes in opposition to himself and his Moscow fellows, but always treated with consideration by him. The essence of the opposition was that of Kutschka-Balakireff [sometimes spelled as Balakirev], Rimsky-Korsakoff, Mussorgsky, Borodin and Cesar Cui-were fanatical Nationalists, believed that music began and ended with folk song, were all, except Rimsky, rather amateurish in technique, and tended to regard Tchaikovsky-the glibness of whose poor moments indeed give them some excuse-as a "featureless eclectic." Some of them, notably Cui, were scarcely civil in the things they said of him. He, on the other hand, describes in his letter their merits as well as their defects with surprising freedom fr...
