“Your frank judgment on my violin concerto pleased me very much,” he writes. “It would have been very disagreeable to me if you, from any fear of wounding the petty pride of a composer, had kept back your opinion. However, I must defend a little the first movement of the concerto. “Of course, it houses, as does every piece that serves virtuoso purposes, much that appeals chiefly to the mind; nevertheless, the themes are not painfully evolved: the plan of this movement sprang suddenly in my head and quickly ran into its mould. I shall not give up the hope that in time the piece will give you greater pleasure.” Next came a more serious setback from Leopold Auer, the widely respected Petersburg virtuoso. Auer was then professor of violin at the Imperial Conservatory and the Czar’s court violinist. Tschaikowsky, hoping to induce Auer to launch the concerto on its career, originally dedicated the work to him. But Auer glanced through the score and promptly decided against it. It was “impossible to play.” Tschaikowsky later made a quaintly worded entry in his diary to the effect that Auer’s pronouncement cast “this unfortunate child of my imagination for many years to come into the limbo of hopelessly forgotten things.” Justly or unjustly, he even suspected Auer of having prevailed on the violinist Emile Sauret to abstain from playing it in St. Petersburg. The ice finally broke when Adolf Brodsky, after two years of admitted laziness and indecision, took it up and succeeded in performing it with the Vienna Philharmonic on December 4, 1881. Yet, even Brodsky, despite his wholehearted espousal of the work, complained to Tschaikowsky that he had “crammed too many difficulties into it.” Previously, in Paris, Brodsky had experimented with the concerto by playing it to Laroche, who, whether because of Brodsky’s rendering or the concerto’s inherent character, confessed “he could gain no true idea of the work.” Even the première went against the new concerto. In the first place Brodsky had to do some strong propagandizing to get Hans Richter to include the work on a Philharmonic program. Then, only one rehearsal was granted. The orchestral parts, according to Brodsky, “swarmed with errors.” At the rehearsal nobody liked the new work. Besides, Richter wanted to make cuts, but Brodsky promptly scotched the idea. Finally, during the performance, the musicians, still far from having mastered the music, accompanied everything pianissimo, “not to go smash.” Of course, Brodsky outlines the chain of contretemps in a letter to Tschaikowsky partly to assuage the composer’s pained feelings on receiving news of the Vienna fiasco. For the première ended with a broadside of hisses, completely obliterating the polite applause coming from some friendly quarters. As the _coup de grâce_ Eduard Hanslick, Europe’s uncrowned ruler of musical destinies, wrote a scathing notice, which Philip Hale rendered as follows: