Against Tchaikovsky’s wish, almost the entire teaching staff of the Moscow Conservatoire, with N. Rubinstein at their head, appeared in Petersburg for the first night of _The Oprichnik_, April 12th (24th), 1874. Although none of the singers were remarkable, yet no individual artist marred the _ensemble_. The chorus and orchestra were the best part of it. The performance ran smoothly. The scenery and costumes were rather old, for the authorities did not care to risk the expense of a very luxurious setting for a new work by a composer whose name was not as yet a guarantee for a brilliant success. On the face of it, the work seemed to have a great success. After the second act the composer was unanimously called before the curtain. The public seemed to be in that enthusiastic mood which is the true criterion of the success of a work. In a box on the second tier sat the composer’s old father with his family. He beamed with happiness. But when I asked him which he thought best for Peter, this artistic success or the Empress Anne’s Order, which he might have gained as an official, he replied: “The decoration would certainly have been better.” This answer shows that in his heart of hearts he still regretted that his son had ceased to be an official. Not that this feeling sprang from petty ambition, or from any other prosaic or egotistical reason, but because he believed that the life of the ordinary man is safer and happier than that of the artist. After the performance the directors of the Moscow and Petersburg sections of the Russian Musical Society gave a supper in honour of Tchaikovsky at the Restaurant Borcille. [Illustration: TCHAIKOVSKY IN 1874] In the course of the evening, Asantchevsky, then principal of the St. Petersburg Conservatoire, delivered an address, in which he informed the composer in flattering terms that the directors of the Petersburg section of the Musical Society had decided to award him the sum of 300 roubles, being a portion of the Kondratiev Bequest for the benefit of Russian composers. The Press notices of _The Oprichnik_ were as contradictory as they were numerous. The opinions of Cæsar Cui and Laroche represented as usual the two opposite poles of criticism. The former declared that while