CHHAIKOVSKY Piotr Ilyich (1840-1893). L.A.S. "P. Tchaikovsky", Kamenka 3/15 July 1881, to Eduard Frantsevich NÁPRAVNIK; 4 pages small in-8 to his number, envelope with stamp; in Russian. Very beautiful letter on his work on Russian religious songs and the composition of his Vespers. Eduard NÁPRAVNIK (1839-1916), of Czech origin, was for a long time the conductor of the Mariinsky Theatre in St. Petersburg, as well as of concerts of the Russian Musical Society, and a close friend of Tchaikovsky , many of whose works he created ] " I received your kind, warm and encouraging letter today, and I am inexpressibly grateful for your friendly concern about me. You are quite right to say that if my apathy towards composition is temporary, this break will be beneficial to me. I will therefore continue to hope that my desire to write music will come back to me, and in my next opera [Mazeppa] I will try to take advantage of all that I have learned from my earlier attempts. But for the time being I am still resting, and it is only little by little that I am taking up the study of our ancient church hymns, and I am trying to adapt them for a four-part choir. The result of this work will be Vespers [op. 52], by which I would like to contribute, however little it may be, to the stripping of our church music, which has been distorted by the banal and talentless editions of the [Imperial] Chapel.