Tchaikovsky’s Patroness
Imagine having a talent and being paid by a rich admirer to forfeit a regular day job and exercise that talent to the best of your ability. You are paid an enormous, regular annuity by this admirer to create your art in secure comfort. It sounds ideal, not to mention incredibly lucky, but there is a bizarre catch: you can never meet your admirer face-to-face, never thank them personally for their patronage of you. What makes it even odder is that your patron is the one who insists on this rule. That was the relationship the Russian composer Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky (1840-1893), the brilliant mind behind the music for the revered ballets Swan Lake, Sleeping Beauty, and The Nutcracker, had with Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck (1831-1894).
Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck, or just Madame von Meck, was the widow of the affluent railway tycoon Karl Otto Georg von Meck. By the time she first entered Tchaikovsky’s life in 1876, she was already a formidable upper-class matron with an impressive list of accomplishments and cultivated tastes. Married at the age of sixteen, she went on to assist her husband—then only a railway engineer on a small salary—in amassing a staggering fortune and building an empire, all the while birthing numerous children, running a large household, and developing her own reputation as an amateur musician.
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