, and '76). All have interest but none quite achieve the reticence and reserved beauty of true quartet style. The Andante cantabile movement of the first, opus 11, founded on a folk-song the composer heard whistled by a house painter, has become deservedly famous. The third, in E-Flat Minor, contains music of a funereal solemnity and tragic feeling anticipating the "Pathetic" Symphony. By far the most successful of all these early works are the orchestral ones where Tchaikovsky's passionate emotion and flair for gorgeous colouring have full away: not perhaps the symphonies (No.2, 1872, and No.3 1875) but more dramatic conceptions like The Tempest (overture, 1873), the tone-poem Francesca da Rimini (1876) and two masterpieces, Romeo and Juliet composed in 1869, and produced and revised a year later, and the magnificent Piano Concerto in B Flat Minor, composed in 1874, at first intended for Nicholas Rubinstein, but owing to his indifference dedicated instead to Hans von Bulow. These works, both by quantity and quality, amply justify the solid and gradually spreading reputation of the middle seventies. Then came a double crisis, involving two women, one of whom, touching Tchaikovsky on his personal and most vulnerable side, nearly wrecked him, and the other, lending timely aid to the impersonal artist in him, the side of him that was truly great, turned his life to new fruitfulness. Antonina Ivanovana Milyukoff hurled herself at his head, declaring in a letter her love for him. He, though misplaced chivalry, was quixotic enough to marry her, July6, 1877. Within a month he discovered their utter incompatibility and on the 26th wrote that a few more days of such life would have driven him mad. He left her for most of the Summer, but made another attempt in early September to live with her in Moscow. Before the month was out he fled to St. Petersburg, arriving in complete nervous collapse, and was taken to the hotel nearest the station, where...
