The Life & Letters of Peter Ilich TchaikovskyChaikovskii, Modest
General
The Life & Letters of Peter Ilich Tchaikovsky
Chaikovskii, Modest
Composers -- Russia -- Biography; Tchaikovsky, Peter Ilich, 1840-1893
“We have been here three days, and shall probably remain a whole
month.... The crush in the railway carriages was indescribable, and
it was very difficult to get anything to eat and drink. Thank God,
however, here we are in Switzerland, where everything goes on in
its normal course. Dear Modi, I cannot tell you what I feel in the
presence of these sublime beauties of Nature, which no one can
imagine without beholding them. My astonishment, my admiration,
pass all bounds. I rush about like one possessed, and never feel
tired. Volodi, who takes no delight in Nature, and is only
interested in the Swiss cheeses, laughs heartily at me. What will
it be like a few days hence, when I shall scramble through the
passes and over glaciers by myself! I return to Russia at the end
of August.”
Tchaikovsky spent six weeks in Switzerland, and then went on to Munich,
where he stayed two days with his old friend Prince Galitsin. From
thence he returned to St. Petersburg by Vienna, which delighted him more
than any other town in the world. From Petersburg he went direct to
Moscow in order to take up his work at the Conservatoire.
During the whole of his trip abroad Tchaikovsky, according to his own
account, did no serious work beyond revising his overture _Romeo and
Juliet_. Thanks to the exertions of N. Rubinstein and Professor
Klindworth, the overture, in its new form, was published in Berlin the
following season, and soon found its way into the programmes of many
musical societies in Germany.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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