“‘Well?’ I asked, and rose from the piano. Then a torrent broke from Rubinstein’s lips. Gentle at first, gathering volume as it proceeded, and finally bursting into the fury of a Jupiter-Tonans. My concerto was worthless, absolutely unplayable; the passages so broken, so disconnected, so unskilfully written, that they could not even be improved; the work itself was bad, trivial, common; here and there I had stolen from other people; only one or two pages were worth anything; all the rest had better be destroyed, or entirely rewritten. ‘For instance, _that_?’ ‘And what meaning is there in _this_?’ Here the passages were caricatured on the piano. ‘And look there! Is it possible that anyone could?’ etc., etc., etc. But the chief thing I cannot reproduce: the _tone_ in which all this was said. An independent witness of this scene must have concluded I was a talentless maniac, a scribbler with no notion of composing, who had ventured to lay his rubbish before a famous man. Hubert was quite overcome by my silence, and was surprised, no doubt, that a man who had already written so many works, and was professor of composition at the Conservatoire, could listen calmly and without contradiction to such a jobation, such as one would hardly venture to address to a student before having gone through his work very carefully. Then he began to comment upon Rubinstein’s criticism, and to agree with it, although he made some attempt to soften the harshness of his judgment. I was not only astounded, but deeply mortified, by the whole scene. I require friendly counsel and criticism; I shall always be glad of it, but there was no trace of friendliness in the whole proceedings. It was a censure delivered in such a form that it cut me to the quick. I left the room without a word and went upstairs. I could not have spoken for anger and agitation. Presently Rubinstein came to me and, seeing how upset I was, called me into another room. There he repeated that my concerto was impossible, pointed out many places where it needed to be completely revised, and said if I would suit the concerto to his requirements, he would bring it out at his concert. ‘I shall not alter a single note,’ I replied, ‘I shall publish the work precisely as it stands.’ This intention I actually carried out.” Not only did Tchaikovsky publish the concerto in its original form, but he scratched out Rubinstein’s name from the dedication and replaced it by that of Hans von Bülow. Personally, Bülow was unknown to him, but he had heard from Klindworth that the famous pianist took a lively interest in his compositions, and had helped to make them known in Germany.