ABSTRACT
The opportunity to visit England came about through a friend of his father’s, an engineer called Vasily Pisarev, who needed an interpreter to accompany him on a tour of western Europe. The two men left St Petersburg in July and travelled to Berlin where Tchaikovsky saw Offenbach’s Orpheus in the Underworld, then to Hamburg, Brussels and Ostend. They arrived in London on 8 August 1861 and spent the following five days sightseeing. Although he enjoyed visiting Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament, Tchaikovsky’s greatest excitement was reserved for a visit to Cremorne Gardens at Chelsea, where lavish entertainments and spectacles were available to the public. ‘I’ve never seen anything like it,’ he wrote. ‘When you go in it’s like something enchanted.’ He attended a concert given by the opera-singer, Adelina Patti, who did not impress him, and he made two visits to the Crystal Palace. On one of these, he heard Handel’s ‘Halleujah’ Chorus sung by 5,000 schoolchildren which he found deeply moving. However, the English weather was a matter for constant complaint by the composer on this and subsequent visits. ‘London is very interesting,’ he told his father, ‘but it makes a certain gloomy impression on my soul. The sun is never seen and it rains all the time.’ On the other hand: ‘The food is very much to my taste. It’s simple, even unsubtle, but liberal in quantity and tasty.’2 Tchaikovsky felt much more at home in Paris, the last call of the tour, seeing operas such as Il Travatore and
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but was relieved to return to Russia at the beginning of
By the time of Tchaikovsky’s next visit to England some twenty-seven years later, he was a celebrated composer. He had abandoned his career as a civil servant two years after his London visit and had taken up music as a full-time student. Among his compositions were Eugene Onegin, the ballet Swan Lake, four symphonies, three string quartets and orchestral works such as Romeo and Juliet, Francesca da Rimini, the 1812 Overture, the Serenade for Strings and perhaps the most popular work, his Piano Concerto No. 1 in B flat minor. The tour was undertaken by Tchaikovsky in the belief that, as his works were comparatively little known in the West, a personal appearance might lead to greater popular recognition. The tour was an exhausting one – Leipzig, where he met Brahms and Grieg, Hamburg, Berlin, Prague, where he met Dvofiák, and Paris. Here he met Fauré, though Tchaikovsky recorded bitterly that he had not been paid a sou for his conducting efforts.
