For centuries generous supporters of the arts—of artists—have enriched the world with their patronage, sometimes anonymously, sometimes with a great measure of self-aggrandizement. Rarely has there been an arrangement like the one between Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky and the wealthy widow Nadezhda von Meck (1831-1894), who, without his awareness, had become quite enamored of his music. She contacted him with a proposal. An excellent, well-schooled pianist, she was recognized for her depth of knowledge and her generous attentions to musicians whose work she especially admired. Nikolai Rubinstein, Claude Debussy and the brilliant Polish violin virtuoso Henryk Wieniawski were among the beneficiaries of her passion for music. She undertook these connections as a music lover who valued her privacy in such personal dealings. From the beginning of her financial arrangement with Tchaikovsky, she made clear to him that the continuance of her support would be conditional upon their maintaining a strict physical separation. They were never to speak with one another.
Their agreement, which provided Tchaikovsky with an annual stipend of 6,000 rubles, as well as other generosities, lasted from 1877 until 1890, during which they exchanged an estimated 1,200 letters. On rare occasions they found themselves in close proximity, but they exchanged nary a word. The letters reveal an emotional—even spiritual—connection between them. “You are quite right, Nadezhda Filaretovna, to suppose that I am of a disposition sympathetic to your own unusual spiritual feeling, which I understand completely.” In 1877 he dedicated his Fourth Symphony to her.
Meck provided Tchaikovsky with financial security, and he provided her with companionship, of a kind, and the immense satisfaction of having eased his life’s travails. After 13 years, various conditions, over which the composer had no control, led to her severing their financial relationship. Her death followed his by only two months, during which she reportedly mourned the loss of this great friendship.
Among the generosities that Meck provided to Tchaikovsky was the use of her various residences (when she was absent) as safe havens for healing from the significant life storms that sometimes overcame him—and where he could live and compose undisturbed. One of those havens was Meck’s Ukrainian estate “Brailivo” (or “Brailovo”), where in May 1878, he spent two weeks at work on several manuscripts. Among them was “The Memory of a Dear Place” for violin and piano, which he dedicated, rather than to a person, to “B*******,” a thinly disguised reference to Meck’s beautiful country home in Ukraine.
Having just finished composing his Violin Concerto in Switzerland, Tchaikovsky traveled east to Ukraine with the discarded original slow movement of the concerto (replaced by the Canzonetta) among his papers. That movement—which he had decided was too intimate for the Violin Concerto—now became an ideal first movement for his tribute to Brailivo. With the Méditation in its appropriate position at the head of the work, Tchaikovsky quickly completed the other two movements, the Scherzo and Mélodie. The whole of this work is purest Tchaikovsky the melodist, with a wild Scherzo providing a showy dance amidst the two romances.
— Program notes by Sandra Hyslop