om bias. For example: "The young Petersburg composers are very gifted, but impregnated with the most horrible presumptuousness and a purely amateur conviction of their superiority. Rimsky-Korsakoff (Korsakov) is the only one among them who discovered. . . . that their doctrines had no sound basis, that their denial of authority and of the masterpieces was nothing but ignorance. . . . Cui is a gifted amateur. Borodin possesses a great talent, which has come to nothing because fate has led him in to the science laboratories instead of a vital music existence. Moussorgsky's [Mussorgsky] gifts are perhaps the most remarkable of all, but his nature is narrow and he has no aspirations toward self-perfection. Besides, his nature is not of the finest quality, and he likes what is coarse, unpolished and ugly. . . ." "What a sad phenomenon," he sums up. "so many talents from which, whit the exception of Rimsky, we can scarcely dare to hope for anything serious. But all the same, these forces exist. Thus Moussorgsky [Mussorgsky], with all his ugliness, speaks a new idiom. . . .We may reasonably hope that Russia will one day produce a whole school of strong men who will open new paths in art." The first decade of Tchaikovsky's life in Moscow was one of much struggle, intensified by several attacks of the nervous depression and morbid self-disgust always dogging him, of first meeting with some of his great contemporaries, such as Turgenev, Tolstoi, Berlioz, Liszt, Saint-Saens, and Wagner, of an abortive love-affair with opera singer Desiree Artot, and above all of a varied production of many kinds of music, of all types from operas to string quartets, which laid the foundation of his skill and fame. Most of the operas, written hastily, uncritically , and sometimes on wretched librettos, were failures, the scores of which in a number of cases he himself destroyed. At the other end of the gamut of musical style are the three String Quartets (1871, '74...
