Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy

Author(s): Edward Garden

Source: Music & Letters, Vol. 55, No. 3 (Jul., 1974), pp. 307-316
Published by: Oxford University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/734227
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 TCHAIKOVSKY AND TOLSTOY

BY EDWARD GARDEN

IT MIGHT at first appear that Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy had little in

common. Tolstoy's knowledge of music was superficial, and though
he enjoyed it and played the piano in his young days, he later was
to reject anything beyond the comprehension of the muzhikl: "I
became convinced", he wrote, "that a piece of music such as Beet-
hoven's Ninth Symphony is less worthy of admiration than Vanka's
song or the lament of the Volga boatmen".2 Tchaikovsky for his part
had a far from impeccable literary taste, especially in comparison
with Borodin and Mussorgsky, whose poetical settings of their own
superb texts in the late i86o's and early I870's resulted in some of
the finest songs ever written. Tchaikovsky's songs of the same period,
on the other hand, are sometimes vapid and vacuous from a literary,
and consequently also from a musical, point of view. Nor was his
choice of libretti for his operas always tasteful-the libretto of 'The
Queen of Spades' (i 890), for instance, is based on his brother Modest's
sentimental travesty of Pushkin's ironic tale.
The personal characteristics of the two men would also appear
to be rather different. Tolstoy later became an opponent of art for
art's sake: Tchaikovsky lived only for his music, a form of
music, symphonic and operatic, which by its nature was
for the most part appreciated at that time only by the upper and
middle classes. Tchaikovsky was a frustrated, guilt-ridden homo-
sexual: Tolstoy had more than a dozen children and was a prophet
and a sage, revered not only in Russia but all over the world, with
disciples and admirers as different as Chertkov and Mahatma
Gandhi. Because of his peculiarity Tchaikovsky was unable to have
a family, for which he longed: Tolstoy's wife angrily averred that he
loved the whole world except his own family, for whom he often
expressed a distaste. When Tchaikovsky appeared in public he was
very much the charming man-about-town, well-dressed and urbane:
Tolstoy went about ostentatiously in a peasant's blouse.
But their only meeting, at the turn of the years I 876-7 in Moscow,
perhaps resulted from one love common to both of them-the love
of Russian folksong, though if he had been more knowledgeable
musically Tolstoy might have made a special journey to St. Peters-
burg and called on Mussorgsky rather than being content with a
visit to the Moscow composer. Tchaikovsky, who much admired

1 Russian peasant.
2 Henri Troyat, 'Tolstoy', translated from the French by N. Amphoux (London,
I 970), p. 307.

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'War and Peace', was astonished and delighted when the great man
called upon himi and he got Nicholas Rubinstein to arrange a con-
cert at the Conservatoire in his honour. The Andante cantabile from
the D major string quartet, based on a Ukrainian folksong, was
played. Tchaikovsky wrote in his diary that he had neverfelt so flattered
in his life and so proud of his creative ability as when Tolstoy, sitting
beside him, heard the Andante with tears coursing down his cheeks.
Afterwards they discussed music. Tchaikovsky, who had been afraid
that Tolstoy would only have to look at him to know his secret
thoughts, was horrified when he expressed the opinion that Beet-
hoven's music was worthless and added that he did not care for
Schumann or Berlioz either. He was annoyed that Tolstoy was so
prejudiced on a subject about which he was clearly uninformed.
He would have been even more annoyed had he known how fickle
Tolstoy's opinions were. Some years earlier Tolstoy had written: "I
play Beethoven [on the piano] and shed tears of tenderness".3
Shortly after he returned to his country house at Yasnaya
Polyana Tolstoy sent the composer some folksongs to arrange.
Tchaikovsky thanked him for them, but stated firmly that in the
version sent to him most of the songs had been forced into D major,
unsuitable for true Russian folksong, which nearly always has an
"indefinite tonality" more like the ancient church modes. Before
they could be adequately set there would have to be an exact trans-
cription of the original songs "as sung by the people".4 Disappointed
in his former idol, Tchaikovsky told Modest that 'Anna Karenina',
which was coming out in serial form at the time, was revolting and
commonplace. Modest, who had praised the novel, was hauled over
the coals for admiring "this disgusting nonentity" with his false
"pyschological analyses". It was all mere aristocratic babbling.
However, when the last instalments appeared and Tchaikovsky had
finished reading them not long afterwards he changed his opinion
and told Modest that he had been wrong and that 'Anna Karenina'
was one of Tolstoy's best works.5
For a short time Tolstoy continued to show interest in Tchaikov-
sky's music. On 27 October I878 he wrote to Turgenev: "What
about 'Eugene Onegin'? I've not yet heard it, but I'm very inter-
ested". Turgenev replied from Paris that he had received the vocal
score of the opera and that it was "undoubtedly notable music.
The lyrical, melodic passages are particularly good".6 But he did
not care for the libretto, in which Pushkin's verses describing the

3 Ibid., p. 252.
4 See my 'Tchaikovsky' (London, I973), p. 26.
5Tchaikovsky's attitude to Dostoyevsky's 'The Brothers Karamazov' was to be the
exact contrary. He admired the first instalments, but when he had read the whole book
he told Modest that Dostoyevsky was "absurd ... Every one of the characters is-mad".
P. Tchaikovsky, 'Polnoye Sobraniye Sochineny: Literaturnye Proizvedeniya i Perepiska',
vol. viii (Moscow, I963), p. 226, in a letter to Modest of 20 May/I June I879.
6 P. I. Tchaikovsky, 'Perepiska s P. I. Jurgensonom', vol. i (Moscow, I938), p. 329;
Gerald Abraham, 'Slavonic and Romantic Music' (London, I968), p. I44.

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actors are put into the mouths of the actors themselves. He told
Tolstoy that Tchaikovsky's fame had increased not only in Paris but
in Germany and England, where "a certain professor of music" at
Cambridge told him that Tchaikovsky's was the most remarkable
musical personality of the times. Turgenev "gaped". 7
Tolstoy's views on music became more and more bigoted as he
grew older. But he went on allowing his wife to have musical even-
ings in his house, and he was sometimes moved by what he heard in
spite of himself. As late as I907 he listened to the playing of Golden-
weiser, one of his admirers, and Wanda Landowska brought her
harpsichord and played to Tolstoy and his circle. He deplored the
evil effects of music, but wept unrestrainedly as he listened. "My
tears mean nothing", he would say afterwards. "So what? There is
,some music I cannot listen to without weeping, that's all, just as my
daughter Sasha cannot eat strawberries without getting hives
It's nerves, nothing but nerves!".8 He shared with Tchaikovsky a
dislike for the music of Wagner, on one occasion walking out before
the end of the second act of 'Siegfried' with the comment: "Fit for
a circus, idiotic, pretentious".9 He paid scant attention to Tchaikov-
sky's later music.
Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, read avidly each new work of
Tolstoy as it appeared. But the masterpieces of fiction induced in him
a feeling of exasperation. In the summer of i886 he wrote to N. G.
Konradi: "I'm re-reading Tolstoy with inexpressible delight. The
more I bow down before his mighty genius as a writer, the less he
pleases me as a thinker and preacher".10 He continued to revere
Tolstoy the writer and was delighted when, after his tour of the
United States in I89I, a New York Herald editorial about the tour
concluded with its selection of living geniuses: "Bismarck to head
the list, of course, Edison, Tolstoy, Sarah Bernhardt, Ibsen, Herbert
Spencer, Dvoirak and Tchaikovsky" ;11 only two Russians on the
list: himself and Tolstoy.
Tolstoy's first great full-length novel was 'War and Peace', the
sixth and last volume of which appeared on the booksellers' shelves
in December I869. The author himself told his wife some years
later: "In 'War and Peace' I loved the idea of the people'".2 In this
and many other respects 'War and Peace' belongs very much to its
period in Russia. The serfs had been freed in i86I and the feeling of
liberalism, love of the people and interest in their folk-art which
this engendered in the 'sixties and early 'seventies pervaded the
whole of Russian art. Even Tchaikovsky's former teacher Anton

7Letter of 15/27 November I878. In I893, on Stanford's recommendation, Tchai-

kovsky received the honorary degree of Doctor of Music at Cambridge University.
8 Maurice Kues, 'Tolstoy living'; quoted in Troyat, op. cit., p. 838.
Troyat, op. cit., p. 172; diary of Lazursky, 20 April I896.
10 P. Tchaikovsky, 'Polnoye Sobraniye Sochineny: Literaturnye Proizvedeniya i
Perepiska', vol. xiii (Moscow, 1971), p. 413.
" H. Weinstock, 'Tchaikovsky' (London, 1946), p. 330.
12 Diary of Countess Tolstoy, entry for 3 March I877.

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Rubinstein moved with the times when he composed his Musical
Picture 'Ivan the Terrible' in i869. As for Tchaikovsky himself, his
early music is no less impregnated by folksong than the music of
Balakirev's nationalist 'mighty handful'. There are folk-like themes
in the opening and slow movements of his first symphony in G minor
(i866-68), and an actual 'folksong', 'The gardens bloomed', is used
in the finale. (Curiously enough, in the other two important Russian
symphonies of the 'sixties, Rimsky-Korsakov's first in E b minor and
Borodin's first in E, major, much less folk-like material is employed
than in Tchaikovsky's symphony, although they were composed by
such prominent members of the nationalist group.) In his second
symphony Tchaikovsky employs Ukrainian folksongs sensitively and
judiciously, and his overture 'Romeo and Juliet' was inspired by and
dedicated to Balakirev, whose overtures on Russian themes and
'King Lear' overture (a very Russian Lear) had considerably in-
fluenced the younger composer, not to mention Borodin and Rimsky-
Korsakov.
But it is the operas of the young Russian composers which may
be most closely compared with 'War and Peace'. Tchaikovsky's first
successful opera was 'The Oprichnik', in which he makes use of some
beautiful folk-material from an earlier opera, 'The Voyevoda'
(I867-8). It received its first performance on I2 April I874, less
than three months after the first performance of Mussorgsky's
'Boris Godunov', and some fifteen months after the premiere of
Rimsky-Korsakov's 'Maid of Pskov', which, like 'The Oprichnik',
is about the reign of Boris Godunov's predecessor, Ivan the Terrible.
Rimsky-Korsakov's and Tchaikovsky's folk or folkish music is
employed and harmonized charmingly but decoratively in the
fresco-like Balakirev manner, entirely appropriate, but diametrically
opposed to the simple, stark bareness of Mussorgsky's extraordinary
penetration of the folk idiom. Tchaikovsky's attempts at realism are
mostly second-hand Meyerbeer, although it must be said in his
defence that there is a good deal of Meyerbeer in 'Maid of Pskov'
and even in 'Boris Godunov' as well. But Tchaikovsky's and Rimsky-
Korsakov's characterization is feeble in comparison to Mussorgsky's.
Only 'Boris Godunov' is the equal of 'War and Peace' in this
respect. Both Mussorgsky and Tolstoy could get right under the
skin of their enormously diverse characters and present them with
startling directness. Tchaikovsky's sympathies were much less
catholic than Mussorgsky's or Tolstoy's and he could paint operatic
portraits convincingly only if he really felt deeply for his characters,
which was by no means invariably the case.
All the same, in his greatest opera Tchaikovsky is able to do this
in masterly fashion. Here, too, is a work which is perhaps more
directly comparable with a Tolstoy novel than the operas just
mentioned, whose similarity to 'War and Peace' was only a product
of the contemporary Russian artistic ethos. 'Eugene Onegin' and

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'Anna Karenina' both reveal important French influences. The opera,
for example, was influenced by some of the more delicate passages
from Act IV of Meyerbeer's 'Les Huguenots' and by Bizet's 'Carmen',
which itself owed much to one of the main influences upon Tolstoy
in 'Anna Karenina': the French psychological novel. But, more
important, the last instalments of 'Anna Karenina' appeared at the
end ofJanuary I877, and Tchaikovsky, as we have seen, completely
revised his poor opinion of Tolstoy's "psychological analyses" when
he had read to the end of the novel. He started work on 'Eugene
Onegin' in May I877, and finished it at the beginning of the fol-
lowing year. Though it is based on Pushkin's 'novel-in-verse' much
of the psychological insight in the opera owes more to Tolstoy than
to Pushkin.
Tchaikovsky was able to achieve this insight by identifying him-
self with the chief characters, particularly Tatyana, who, as it were,
takes him over body and soul. Before he had started composing the
opera, he had received letters from Antonina Ivanovna Milyukova.
Immersed as he was in the scenario of 'Eugene Onegin' and obsessed
with the pathos of Tatyana's unrequited love and Onegin's brusque
rebuttal, he reflected that he had "acted thoughtlessly" in rejecting
her overtures, and took the fatally foolish step of proposing marriage.
He wvas living out his own life as if it were a favourite opera or
poem; fiction was being mixed up with fact.
In 'Anna Karenina' Tolstoy, too, identified himself so closely
with his characters that, according to his biographer Henri Troyat,
they "began to impose their own wills on the author".'13 He originally
condemned Anna in the name of morality. Unfaithful to her husband
Karenin, she was the "incarnation of lechery" and was not even
beautiful. Karenin himself started off as a "warm sensitive soul,
cultivated and kind". But as he became more and more intrigued
by his 'sinner' Anna, the author had drastically to revise his ideas
about her. She became "a very beautiful woman", unobtrusively
elegant, with "an expression of utter sweetness in her charming
face . . . Her eyes and her smile revealed vast stores of repressed
vitality". On the other hand Karenin became a "dried-up, self-
centred, narrow-minded man, a pure product of Petersburg bureau-
cracy", though he was allowed to become more human during
Anna's illness. But most of all, Tolstoy identified himself with
Konstantin Levin. As Troyat puts it:

He shamelessly attributed to him the events of his own life, fed him
with his ideas, the books he read, his own blood. The relationship
between Levin and Kitty-the declaration scene using the first letters
of words, the wedding ceremony, including the last minute hesitation
... the young couple's first days in their country home, the birth of
their first child-were one and all transposed from the author's past.

3 Troyat, Op. Cit., p. 497 et seq.

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Nor is this very different from letting his characters take him over
so as to act out his real life as if it were fiction. The many-sided,
ebullient, moody, neurotically inconsistent author tended to behave
in his life in a manner perhaps more suitable for fictional characters,
and the fact that he was storing up these divergent experiences for
future use in novels came as no surprise to those who knew him best,
since it is just this that makes 'Anna Karenina' and the other novels
so true to life. Although 'Eugene Onegin' was not such an im-
mediate success as 'Anna Karenina', it soon began to enjoy the
favour not only of the sophisticated but of the ordinary opera-goer.
It became one of the Tsar's favourite operas.
As they grew older both Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy became more
subject to bouts of depression, less and less at one with themselves.
In Tchaikovsky's case the reason for this is obvious. The aging
homosexual's lot in the nineteenth century was not a happy one.
He fell in love with his own nephew and hated himself, writing in
his diary: "What a monster of a person I am". Though he was an
ordinary heterosexual, Tolstoy also suffered periods of self-hatred
as a result of a rather morbid dichotomy of soul and body. In his
youth he had sown the customary aristocratic wild oats, frequenting
gypsy brothels and having mistresses both at home and during his
period of army service in the Caucasus. He had had a child by
a peasant woman on his own estate. He kept diaries meticulously of
all his doings, these not excluded, and he made his young eighteen-
year-old fiancee read them just before their marriage. Not un-
naturally she was upset, and though she loved Tolstoy deeply she
never really got over the shock of her wedding night: she horrified
their daughter Tanya with her description of this and of the marital
relations between couples- "the fearful humiliation all married
women suffer".'4 Her inability to enjoy her physical relationship
with her husband resulted in a developing feeling of guilt on Tolstoy's
part. It was not long before he began condemning his bodily
appetites and subconsciously blaming his wife for stimulating them.
After his 'conversion', as he called it, he preached the desirability
of complete sexual abstinence.
In 'War and Peace' Tolstoy expressed his views of love leading
to domestic happiness. In 'Anna Karenina' the adulterous passion
of Anna and Vronsky is condemned, but marital affection is still
exalted in the persons of Levin and Kitty. In 'The Kreutzer Sonata'
matrimony itself is cursed. His own quarrels with his wife are
ruthlessly set down in black and white, with little attempt to disguise
who the dramatis personae are. But the would-be saint, now in his
sixties, was still far from being able to practise the abstinence he
preached. Soon after finishing 'The Kreutzer Sonata' he wrote in
his diary: "And what if another baby came? How ashamed I

14 Ibid., p. 650.

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should be, especially in front of my children! They will compare
the date of conception with that of publication of 'The Kreutzer
Sonata' ". And his wife wrote in her diary:

He is being charming, cheerful and affectionate again. It is, alas,

always for the same reason. If those who have read and are reading
'The Kreutzer Sonata' could have one glimpse of Lyovochka's
[Tolstoy's] love life, if they could see what makes him so gay and
kind, they would hurl their idol down from the pedestal they have
put him on.15

Five years earlier, in I884, Tchaikovsky had read 'Confession'.

Troyat writes of this work:

Many of its pages are remarkable for their tragic beauty, but the
general impression created by the book is an unhealthy one of public
exposure and flagellation . .. The extravagance of his language casts
doubts on the nobility of his purpose.16

Tchaikovsky, too, has been criticized for wearing his heart too
much on his sleeve in his music, for "burrowing deep into the
dunghill" of his emotions "with too-evident relish".' 17 It is not sur-
prising that he wrote to Mme. von Meck: "It has made a strong
impression on me, because I, also, know the torments of doubt and
tragic perplexity which Tolstoy has experienced and so well described
in 'Confession' '".18
But the deepest impression of all was made not by 'The Kreutzer
Sonata' nor by 'Confession' but by a remarkable book which
appeared in i886: 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich'. This story of the
cruel progress of a judge's fatal disease (cancer of the abdominal
region) and of his gradual realization of the emptiness of his past
life, punctilious though it had been in the eyes of the world, is
enormously powerful. The great critic Vladimir Stassov, whose
active assistance had meant so much to Russian composers and to
whom Tchaikovsky had dedicated his 'Tempest' Fantasia, wrote to
Tolstoy: "No nation anywhere in the world has a work as great as
this. Everything is little and petty in comparison with these seventy
pages".', After reading it he wrote in his diary that he was convinced
that Tolstoy was the greatest author of all time and that he believed
in his immense almost divine importance. He told Modest: "Tolstoy's
'Death of Ivan Ilyich' has had a terribly sombre effect on me. It's
a work of supreme genius-but it's agonizing in the extreme".20
Like Tchaikovsky, we feel for Ivan Ilyich because we have
15 Ibid., p. 665.
16 Ibid., p. 548-9.
17 These terms are used by Troyat about Tolstoy's 'Confession'.
18 P. Tchaikovsky, op. cit., vol. xii (Moscow, 1970), p. 336, in a letter to Mme. von
Meck of 13/25 March I884.
19 Troyat, op. cit., p. 641.
20 P. Tchaikovsky, op. cit., vol. xiii (Moscow, 197I), p. 406, in a letter of i8/30 July
i886.

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experienced many of his feelings and yearnings ourselves. "He
longed to be petted, kissed and wept over, as children are petted
and comforted", Tolstoy writes. "He knew he was an important
functionary, that he had a beard turning grey, and that therefore
what he longed for was impossible; but nevertheless he longed for
it".21 In I882 Tchaikovsky had written to his newly-married brother
Anatol of his unfulfilled need to be "caressed" by a woman; his
own disastrous unconsummated marriage five years before that
makes it clear that what he required were the caresses not of a lover
but of a mother-his mother's death when he was fourteen had had
a traumatic effect upon him. His extraordinary pen-contact with
MVIme. von Meck (whom he never met) was the nearest he was to
get to what was in his case a desire to regress to his childhood, which
he saw through rose-tinted spectacles. When he discovered, near
the end of his life, that his former governess Fanny Duirbach was
still living, he went to Switzerland to visit her. He wrote to his
elder brother Nicholas:

She showed me our exercise books . . . my work, your and my letters,

but, most interesting of all, some wonderfully dear letters of Mama
... I seemed to breath the air of our Votkinsk home and hear the
voice of Mama and the others . . . She gave me as a present one
wonderful letter from Mama.22

Ivan Ilyich, also, in reviewing his past life as he lies dying, finds
consolation only in his childhood:

If he thought of the stewed prunes that had been offered him for
dinner that day, his mind went back to the raw, wrinkled French
plums of his childhood, their peculiar flavour and the flow of saliva
when he got to the stones, and along with this recollection of the
taste of a plum there arose a whole series of other memories of the
same period-his nurse, his brother, his toys. "But I mustn't think
of all that . . . it's too painful".23

And a few pages further on: "It was true, as the doctor said, that
Ivan Ilyich's physical sufferings were terrible, but worse than his
physical sufferings were his mental sufferings, which were his
chief torture".24 Tchaikovsky's mental sufferings were agonizing
too. He had had a nervous breakdown in the 'sixties, he had at-
tempted suicide soon after his marriage in I877 and he was heading
for another collapse in the early 'nineties; he himself wrote more
than once that his only relief was composition.
The last few pages of 'Ivan Ilyich' are the most powerful of all.
As a result of his obsession with 'Carmen' Tchaikovsky had long
21 Tolstoy, trans. R. Edmonds, 'The Cossacks'; 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich'; 'Happy
ever after' (London, I960), p. 144.
22 See my 'Tchaikovsky', p. 137.
28 Tolstoy, op. cit., p. '55.
24 Ibid., p. 157-

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been fascinated by the idea of remorseless unrelenting Fate, but he
had only been able to achieve a musical interpretation of this idea
very imperfectly in such works as the fourth symphony. The fifth
symphony was more successful in this respect, but it was not until
the very end of his life that he was able to match in music such
passages as the following from the last chapter of Tolstoy's book:

From that moment the screaming began that continued for three
days and was so awful that one could not hear it through closed doors
two rooms away without horror ... he realized that he was lost, that
there was no return, that the end had come, the very end, while
his doubts were still unsolved and remained doubts.
"Oh! Oh! Oh !" he cried in varying intonations. He had begun by
screaming, "I won't!" and so had gone on screaming on the same
vowel sound "o".
For three whole days, during which time did not exist for him, he
struggled in that black sack into which he was being forced by an
unseen, invincible power.25

Surely in the whole of contemporary music only the shattering

development section of the first movement of Tchaikovsky's sixth
symphony equals such passages as this in power and concision, for
in his last years he had learned how to cut and to prune, leaving
only what was essential and thus greatly increasing the effect of his
music, just as Tolstoy, in this long short-story or novella of 70 or so
pages, concentrates on only one person and how events and other
people affect him, dispensing entirely with the plethora of characters
created in 'War and Peace' and 'Anna Karenina'. What is more,
Tchaikovsky originally called his sixth symphony 'Programme
Symphony', and though he never produced the programme there
is little room for doubt that it was a symphony on the triumph of
death over life.26
"He fought as a man condemned to death fights in the hands
of the executioner, knowing that he cannot save himself", Tolstoy
continues. In the terrifying third movement of the symphony
Tchaikovsky's achievement is to have created a superficially triumph-
ant scherzo/march in the major mode, in which the underlying
feeling of menace becomes more and more apparent; and in the end
it is seen that the triumph is for 'Field-Marshal Death' himself.
"Every moment he felt that, notwithstanding all his struggles, he
was drawing nearer and nearer to what terrified him". In Tchai-
kovsky's extraordinary, novel, Adagio lamentoso finale, death
slowly and inexorably overwhelms all.27

25 Ibid., p. 159.
26 See John Warrack, 'Tchaikovsky Symphonies and Concertos' (London, I969),
pp. 34-5; Gerald Abraham, 'On Russian Music' (London, n.d.), pp. 143-6.
27 The very end of 'The Death of Ivan Ilyich' is rather different. The judge's soul is
finally awakened, and "in place of death there was light". Tchaikovsky had tried to
achieve this kind of 'strife to victory' programme in his fifth symphony (i888) and wisely
avoided it in his sixth.

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 It was no mean achievement for Tchaikovsky to have matched
these passages without obvious recourse to such devices as that by
now rather hackneyed old war-horse, the diminished seventh, as in
'The Queen of Spades', or to interminable frenetic sequences or
the like. Tchaikovsky's language is just as overwhelmingly direct
as Tolstoy's. The composer died of cholera a day or two after he had
conducted the first performance of the sixth symphony. The Adagio
lamentoso was proclaimed to be 'prophetic', rumours were rife
about the composer's 'suicide' and these did the success of the
symphony no harm even if they were not entirely responsible for
the instant fame it achieved. One may or may not agree with the
New rork Herald editorial that the two Russian geniuses of the day
were Tchaikovsky and Tolstoy. Tolstoy's reputation has remained
as high as it was then up to the present day; Tchaikovsky's music
was possibly over-rated in the i89o's, but it could be that it is
under-rated in the I970's.

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