he became unconscious for 48 hours and then passed into high fever. Ordered by the doctors to leave Russia, he gradually regained strength at Clarens, a quiet village on Lake Geneva, where he later did some of his best work. Neither partner to this unfortunate marriage had any blame to give the other. Nadejda Fillaretovna von Meck [also spelled Nadezhda von Meck], the widow of a wealthy railway engineer, had fallen under the spell of Tchaikovsky's music the year before, had given him several commissions, and had begun the long correspondence with him that reveals for us so much of his inner life. Nine years older than he and living in a socially different world, rich and apparently some what spoiled and autocratic but at any rate sincere in her love for his music, she had the good sense or the good luck (it was hard to tell which) to stipulate from the first that they should have no personal intercourse. They could not be sure to avoid one or two casual meetings at musical events, but it is said they never spoke to each other-they who wrote so inexhaustibly. Nothing could have been better suited to the queer psychology of Tchaikovsky. Secure from upsetting attacks of his personal privacy, he was provided form 1877 on, not only with an income of 6,000 rouble, which enabled him to give up teaching but with a tireless listener to all his opinions, beliefs, impressions, hopes, despairs, and aspirations. Almost at once he resumed work on the splendid Fourth Symphony which he had begun before the unfortunate marriage; and early in 1878 finished it, and also his most successful opera, Eugene Onegin. That same year he wrote at Clarens the immensely popular Violin Concerto. Manfred followed in 1885; the Fifth Symphony in 1888; another successful opera, Pique Dame (The Queen of Spades), in 1890; the Casse-Noisette Ballet, from which the delightful Suite is drawn, in 1891. In these prosperous years his fame all over the world was rapidly increasi...
