Nadezhda Filaretovna von Meck (; 13 January 1894) was a Russian businesswoman who became an influential patron of the arts, especially music. She is best known today for her artistic relationship with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, supporting him financially for thirteen years, so that he could devote himself full-time to composition, while stipulating that they were never to meet. Tchaikovsky dedicated his Symphony No. 4 in F minor to her. She also gave financial support to several other musicians, including Nikolai Rubinstein and Claude Debussy.
Life
Childhood Nadezhda von Meck was born Nadezhda Filaretovna Frolovskaya, in a family which owned large landed estates. Her father, Filaret Frolovsky, embraced her love of music from an early age, while from her mother, Anastasia Dimitryevna Potemkina, she learned energy, determination, and business acumen.
A serious student of music in her youth, Nadezhda became a capable pianist with a good knowledge of the classical repertoire. She also mastered some foreign languages, learned to appreciate the visual arts, and read widely in literature, history, and philosophy, especially the work of Arthur Schopenhauer and the Russian idealist Vladimir Solovyov.
Marriage At seventeen, Nadezhda was married to Karl Otto Georg von Meck, a 27-year-old engineer and the son of Major Otto Adam von Meck by his marriage to Wilhelmine Hafferberg – Baltic Germans from Riga. Together they had thirteen children, of whom eleven survived to adulthood.
As a government official, Karl von Meck's life was uneventful, and his work was poorly paid. With several children quickly added to his responsibilities, however, he was reluctant to make a break with a steady post.
Nadezhda von Meck saw things very differently. To her, filling the roles of mother, nurse, governess, dressmaker, housekeeper, and valet was far easier to bear than the humiliation of seeing her husband as a cog in the machine of a government organization. Neither did fulfilling all those domestic duties lower her resolve or weaken her energy in urging him to make a break. Russia, desperately short of railways, was expanding its communications network rapidly, and Nadezhda saw that a future for her husband lay there. She continually exerted pressure on him to find a partner with capital and to join the boom in Russian railway construction.
Von Meck finally gave in to his wife's urgings and resigned from the civil service, at which point they had an income of only twenty kopecks a day on which to live. Nadezhda was right, though, to trust her husband's talent as an engineer. In 1860, there were only 100 miles of railroad track laid in Russia. Twenty years later, there were over 15,000 miles of lines. Much of this explosion was due to Karl von Meck, and his investments made him a multi-millionaire. The railway lines for which he was responsible included that from Kursk to Kiev and the highly profitable Moscow to Ryazan line, with its effective monopoly of grain transportation from the Black Earth Region of Central Russia.
In 1876, Karl von Meck died suddenly, leaving a will which gave Nadezhda control of his vast financial holdings. This included two railway networks, large landed estates, and several million rubles in investments. With seven of their eleven children still at home, von Meck concentrated on her business affairs and on the education of the children still dependent on her. She sold one of von Meck's railway companies and ran the other one with the help of her brother and her eldest son, Vladimir.
Withdrawal from society After the death of her husband, von Meck took no part in social life, withdrawing into almost complete seclusion. She even refused to meet the relatives of those whom her children were going to marry, and she never attended any of their weddings.
By all accounts, von Meck was imperious by nature, presiding over her household despotically. She expected to have her own way, so surrounded herself only with people who would give it to her, and she ruled her children's lives in every detail. As they grew into adulthood, she arranged their marriages, bought houses for them, and even chose furniture for their houses. When she wanted to see her married children, she summoned rather than invited them. Understandably, her children were not always grateful for the extreme degree of their mother's care (or meddling, depending on the viewpoint of the person concerned).
Von Meck was always compulsively busy. She took her more senior servants on periodic inspection tours of her house from cellar to roof, and the house never remained quite the same after such tours. String was saved for her to untangle and wind. Books were bought so that she might cut the pages. She purchased quantities of wool, which she then wound into balls and sent to her daughter, Countess Bennigsen. While engaging in this business, she would summon her daughter Julia to come and read to her. Julia did not mind. Of all the von Meck children, she was the one most eager to please her mother, who demanded everything from her—and got it.
Von Meck was probably well aware that she was hard to tolerate. She wrote to Tchaikovsky, I am very unsympathetic in my personal relations because I do not possess any femininity whatever; second, I do not know how to be tender, and this characteristic has passed on to my entire family. All of us are afraid to be affected or sentimental, and therefore the general nature of our family relationships is comradely, or masculine, so to speak.Tchaikovsky, P. I., Perepiska s N. F. fon Mekk (1876–1890) [Correspondence with N. F. von Meck], ed. Zhdanov, Vladimir and Zhegin, Nikolai (Moscow and Leningrad, 1934–1936), 3:197. As quoted in Poznansky, 197.
Personal views Von Meck was a professed atheist, which was not unusual in aristocratic Russia in the 1870s. Her fierce need for independence, on the other hand, was very unusual for a woman of the time. Her division between that and concern for her family resulted in contradictions between her beliefs and actions. Her views on affairs of the heart were strictly moral, but she did not believe in marriage as a social institution and regularly professed her hatred of it to Tchaikovsky. "You may think, my dear Pyotr Ilyich, that I am a great admirer of marriage," she wrote on 31 March 1878, "but in order that you not be mistaken in anything referring to myself, I shall tell you that I am, on the contrary, an irreconcilable enemy of marriages, yet when I discuss another person's situation, I consider it necessary to do so from his point of view."As quoted in Poznansky, p. 198. On another occasion, she stated more genially but no less forcefully, "The distribution of rights and obligations as determined by social laws I find speculative and immoral."
Even with her views on matrimony, von Meck was resigned to it as a means of social stability and procreation, and her own marital experience may have forced her to recognize its benefits. This realization may have also been why she strove to marry off her children as soon as possible—to ensure their stability in the event of her demise. Even in marriage, though, she considered sexual relations between men and women to be mutual exploitation. Russian radical thinkers of the period, such as Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Dmitry Pisarev, espoused views not far removed from hers. Both men considered marriage to be a pillar of bourgeois society and called for its abolition. Von Meck especially respected Pisarev's work, as well as 19th-century positivism in general.
Support of the performing arts
With her great wealth and her passion for music, von Meck became a major mover in the Russian performing arts. The sole exception to her general reclusiveness was the series of Russian Musical Society concerts given in Moscow, which she attended incognito, sitting alone in the balcony. Through these concerts she made the acquaintance of Nikolai Rubinstein, with whom she maintained a complex relationship. While she respected Rubinstein's talents and energy, that did not stop her from disagreeing strongly with him at times.
While her husband was still alive, von Meck began actively supporting and promoting young musicians, several of whom she continually employed, living in her household and playing her favorite works. She hired Claude Debussy as a music tutor for her daughters, and he wanted to marry one of them. She would not give her permission, preferring her daughters to marry men of her own choosing.
In February 1880, von Meck came to the assistance of the Polish violinist Henryk Wieniawski, who had been taken ill in Odessa while on a concert tour. She moved him into her house and arranged medical treatment for him, but he died a few weeks later in Moscow.Classical ArchivesDavid Mason Greene, Greene’s Biographical Encyclopedia of Composers
Relationship with Tchaikovsky In 1877, one of the musicians she supported was violinist Iosif Kotek, with whom she played chamber music. Kotek was a former student and friend of Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, recommended to von Meck by Nikolai Rubinstein. She had already been impressed with Tchaikovsky's music such as his symphonic poem The Tempest, and she asked Rubinstein at length about him. She wrote to the composer. Introducing herself as a "fervent admirer", she commissioned some pieces for violin and piano to be played at her house. Tchaikovsky quickly obliged. One of her first commissions was for a funeral march, which was never published and is now considered lost.Letter from Nadezhda von Meck, 7 March 1877, and subsequent enthusiastic thanks. As quoted in von Wolfurt, p. 17.
They continued writing even as his marriage followed its brief though tortuous course. As their relationship developed, she subsequently provided him with an allowance of 6,000 rubles a year, large enough that he could leave his professorship at the Moscow Conservatory to focus on creative work full-time. This was a substantial income. A minor government official in those days had to support his family on 300–400 rubles a year.
Tchaikovsky was grateful for von Meck's financial support. Nevertheless, it created some emotional discomfort and an underlying tension, but they both eventually handled this awkwardness with considerable delicacy. Still, Tchaikovsky could not help feeling vaguely uncomfortable about the favors with which von Meck showered him. He wrote to her frankly about this: "... in my relations with you there is the ticklish circumstance that every time we write to one another, money appears on the scene."Tchaikovsky, P. I., Perepiska s N.F. fon Mekk (1876–1890) [Correspondence with N. F. von Meck], ed. Zhdanov, Vladimir and Zhegin, Nikolai (Moscow and Leningrad, 1934–1936), 1:14. As quoted in Poznansky, 200.
Epistolary friendship They carried on a significant correspondence, exchanging over 1,200 letters between 1877 and 1890. The details they shared were extraordinary for two people who never met. He was more open to her about much of his life and his creative processes than to any other person. Her feedback became so important to him that, after the critics lambasted his Fifth Symphony, she provided him with the support to persevere with his composing.While these letters have proved invaluable to Tchaikovsky researchers over the years, many of them suffered from cuts made by previous editors. A collection currently being published by Musik Produktion International is planned to include all surviving letters in full, including many new letters which have been discovered recently. Von Meck died believing these letters had all been destroyed. However, when Tchaikovsky received her request to do so, he assured her that he had destroyed them, but then filed that letter with all the rest for posterity to find.