On November 6, 1891, Peter Tchaikovsky had just conducted his new symphonic poem Voyevode in a Moscow concert arranged by his young editor Alexander Siloti. The applause seemed restrained, and when Tchaikovsky came back into the artists’ greenroom, he destroyed the manuscript and told the attendant to gather all of the orchestral parts and bring them to him.

Siloti intervened, saying, “Excuse me, Pyotr Ilyich, but I am the master here, and I alone can give orders.” He ordered that all of the orchestral parts be taken to his house.

Tchaikovsky, who was already depressed, protested, “How dare you talk to me like that!”

Siloti answered, “We’ll talk about it some other time.”

The next night, a gathering was arranged at which friends of Tchaikovsky would try to dispel the gloom he felt about Voyevode. His brother Modest was first to arrive, and he reported that Tchaikovsky had been feeling very low all day and inclined to stay holed up in his hotel room.

At the gathering, Tchaikovsky’s friends were discussing the new piece without enthusiasm when Tchaikovsky arrived. The first thing he said was, “Well, what do you think of my Voyevode? Lousy, isn’t it?”

An awkward silence ensued, broken only when Tchaikovsky asked the outspoken composer Sergei Taneyev his opinion.

“Well,” Taneyev said, “it is rather poor. I mean, your love scenes–Romeo, for example, and Francesca, are fine, but here–”

“Yes, you are quite right,” Tchaikovsky said, “it’s a lousy piece.”

All efforts to cheer him up failed until inventor Julius H. Block played some phonograph recordings, including a performance of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Trio in A minor, which kept him entranced until 1:30 in the morning.

As he left, Tchaikovsky told Block, “I came here feeling sick and worn out, but I leave you completely cured and happy. Allow me to repeat the cure whenever I feel depressed.”

Julius Block tells the story in a reminiscence of his friendship with Tchaikovsky.

In his book My Trips to America, Herz describes the eccentricities of concertizing in the New World. P. T. Barnum, who was Jenny Lind’s manager at the time, approached Herz in New York and suggested that he play in a concert during which the famed Swedish soprano would appear as an angel descending from heaven. Although Herz was such a flamboyant player that his gesticulations were known to make audiences bust into laughter, in the interest of dignity, Herz declined Barnum’s offer, not knowing that even more farfetched proposals would come his way.

Herz arrived in Philadelphia to find that arrangements had already been made for him to perform “illuminated by one thousand candles.” The promised novelty had made the concert sell out in less than a day. But the full house was not necessarily a blessing. When Herz finished playing the first piece on the program, an audience member shouted out that the stage was eight candles short of the advertised number, demanded his money back, and strode from the hall.

Herz’s manager, Bernard Ullmann, was a Barnum-in-training. He arranged for Herz to play in a grand patriotic concert that would involve five orchestras, chorus, and soloists, a patriotic speech, and a grand triumphal march for forty pianos. Herz balked, but agreed to perform with a mere sixteen pianos. His own chorus Le Capitole was to follow, and the finale would be a grand military rendition of Hail Columbia!

If anyone laughed at the performance, Herz would have shared in the merriment. He returned to Paris a wealthy man.

At twenty-one he was a mediocre violinist in Venice’s San Samuele theater, later describing himself as “a menial journeyman of a sublime art in which, if he who excels is admired, the mediocrity is rightly despised,” adding, “I soon acquired all the habits of my degraded fellow musicians.”

The next twenty years of his life consisted of various hare-brained schemes and hair-breadth escapes, amorous intrigues, and banishment from one city after another.

He became so notorious in most of Europe that in 1767 he headed to Spain, where his escapades were little known. He was an avid dancer, learned the fandango, and attended the Italian Opera in Madrid, where his abilities as a librettist led to some commissions.

“An Italian conductor wanted to have a play set to music,” he recalled. “The time was too short to send to Italy, and so I declared myself ready to compose a play on the spot.” He summarized the creative process by saying, “The music was highly praised, and in a fortnight the whole opera was produced.”

But whatever success he had in Spain went bad because of his involvement with a dancer named Nina in Barcelona. Her specialty was a maneuver called the rebaltalde, a kind of back-flip with pirouettes, and one memorable night, while executing it, she “exposed her drawers to the belt.”

In Spain there was a fine of one dollar for revealing that particular undergarment in public, and so for her next performance Nina avoided the fine on a technicality by dispensing with the offending part of her costume entirely, causing an uproar that was a mix of indignation and enthusiasm.

After an attempt on his life and six weeks imprisonment in the local Citadel, Casanova beat it back to Venice, where he got into the good graces of the authorities for a time by working for them as a commercial spy.

Composer Hector Berlioz thought big and fought big, as becomes apparent in this letter he wrote to his sister on November 2, 1840:

I've just put on a festival at the Paris Opéra. I conducted 450 instrumentalists and singers in selections from my Requiem....

A couple of weeks earlier there had been plots to prevent the Opéra orchestra from playing for me, slurs in the newspapers, threats, and so on. The rehearsal the day before yesterday was awfully tiring and muddled, so you can imagine how worried I was.

But when I made my entrance yesterday evening on that vast Opéra stage, made even more vast by a ramp sloping down to the audience, when I saw my attentive troops and the entire auditorium bathed in light, when I heard the audience tremble at the first chorus sung by the priestesses of Diana during the storm, and when I heard the applause after the chorus of the Scythians, I knew that everything was all right.

So I started my Dies Irae confidently, despite two or three pests I knew to be in the stalls. The mass of sound was awesome. The place was shaking from the force of the voices, the thundering, and the trumpets. This rendition of the Last Judgment overwhelmed them, and three times in the middle of the piece, applause and shouts from the audience drowned out my army of singers.

At the end of the piece some helpful foe was dumb enough to let out a blast on a whistle, and the entire audience stood up and yelled at him. My performers added their own applause. The women were clapping with their music, the violins and double basses with their bows, the timpanists with their sticks. So you might call the whole thing a furious success.