the former could make his debut in Paris as a conductor.

“I haven’t yet con-

ducted in Paris; so give me a concerto so I can take up the baton,” Rubinstein
declared to him.16 Fortunately, for Saint-Saëns, this somewhat impossible de-
mand proved feasible only because the composer had been carrying about with
him the idea of a concerto for several months, and it took him just seventeen
days to set it down on paper. The result was the Piano Concerto No. 2 in G
minor, which Saint-Saëns performed on 13 May at the Salle Pleyel under Ru-
binstein’s direction.
On 12 April Vera Rubinstein arrived in Paris with their son, Yakov. She told
him about the concert in Moscow given by Nikolay Rubinstein and Ferdinand
Laub on 27 February/10 March, during which Nikolay had given the ¤rst per-
formance of Tchaikovsky’s Scherzo in F, Op. 2, No. 2. The concert had been a
failure in the ¤nancial sense, and Anton put this down to the fact that it was a
mistake for the head of the Conservatory to give concerts unless the proceeds
were donated to some charitable cause. He had understood the importance of
this and had abstained from giving solo piano concerts while he had been di-
rector of the St. Petersburg Conservatory. He was also amused to hear that back
in Russia he was now being called “our Russian composer and artiste.” “Just for
that alone I was right in going away; thanks to this, even in Russia they will
¤nally consider me Russian,” he told Kaleriya Khristoforovna with a note of
bitter irony.17
A few days earlier he had met Alexander Herzen at the Café de l’Opéra. Her-
zen recalled that Rubinstein ordered a bottle of Roederer frappé and fearlessly
raised a toast to “this happy meeting.” As the café was full of people and there
was every possibility that their conversation might be overheard by police in-
formants, Herzen suggested that the meeting might not prove such a happy one
for him, but Rubinstein played the hero and said loudly: “I don’t care a straw.”18
During his many years of exile in London and Geneva, Herzen had campaigned
tirelessly against serfdom and the iniquities of the tsarist government and au-
tocracy, but Rubinstein boldly reported this encounter with the “wandering
Bell” to Edith Raden in an extended letter of 10–14 April. Well aware that this
was not a matter that could be freely discussed in writing, he reserved the details
for a time that he could communicate them to her verbally. He told her about
the “brilliant success” he had had at the Paris Conservatory when he had played
his Piano Concerto No. 2 (1/13 April), but he had refused to play in Pasdeloup’s
“Concerts populaires,” even though the public was clamoring for him. Some-
thing inside had forced him to despise popular art: “je suis pour les concerts
impopulaires [I am for the unpopular concerts],” he told her. He felt that art in
France was in serious decline and expressed his horror at the idea that “To be
or not to be” could be set to music and garnished with musical roulades. The
premiere of Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet took place at the Opéra on 9 March
1868, but Rubinstein regarded the opera as nothing short of hackwork. By com-
parison, Meyerbeer seemed like a giant and even the weakest of his operas
seemed like a masterpiece. Generally, he regarded opera as a form of popular
art at a time when the symphony was considered unpopular. The symphony

128 Anton Rubinstein