mount
of work, he must have possessed immense energy and devotion to his
ideals.

One of the operas just mentioned was entitled "Vakoula the Smith."
It bears the date of 1874, and was first offered in competition with
others. The result was that it not only was considered much the
best work of them all but it won both the first and second prizes.
"Vakoula" was splendidly mounted and performed in St. Petersburg, at
the Marinsky Theater at least seventeen times. Ten years later, in
January 1887, it appeared again. The composer meanwhile had re-written
a good part of it and now called it "Two Little Shoes." This time
Tschaikowsky was invited to conduct his own work. The invitation
filled him with alarm, for he felt he had no gift in that direction,
as he had tried a couple of times in the early years of his career and
had utterly failed. However, he now, through the cordial sympathy of
friends, decided to make the attempt. Contrary to his own fears, he
obtained a successful performance of the opera.

It proved an epoch-making occasion. For this first success as
conductor led him to undertake a three months' tour through western
Europe in 1888. On his return to St. Petersburg he conducted a program
of his own compositions for the Philharmonic Society, which was
also successful, in spite of the intense nervousness which he always
suffered. As a result of his concert he received offers to conduct
concerts in Hamburg, Dresden, Leipsic, Vienna, Copenhagen and London,
many of which he accepted.

To go back a bit in our composer's life story, to an affair of
the heart which he experienced in 1868. He became engaged to the
well-known singer Desiree Artot; the affair never went further, for
what reason is not known. He was not yet thirty, impressionable and
intense. Later on, in the year 1877, at the age of thirty-seven, he
became a married man. How this happened was doubtless told in his
diaries, which were written with great regularity: but unfortunately
he destroyed them all a few years before his death. The few facts that
have been gleaned from his intimate friend, M. Kashkin, are that he
was engaged to the lady in the spring of this year, and married her
a month or so afterward. It was evidently a hasty affair and
subsequently brought untold suffering to the composer. When
the professors of his Conservatoire re-assembled in the autumn,
Tschaikowsky appeared among them a married man, but looking the
picture of despair. A f