Variations on a Rococo Theme, op. 33

Only one laconic sentence in Tchaikovsky's papers refers to the piece: a letter of 1876 to his brother Anatoly, saying that he was writing variations for cello with orchestra. He dedicated them to Wilhelm Fitzenhagen, the German cellist who taught at the Moscow Conservatory and played in the premieres of his string quartets. Tchaikovsky had complained in print that the cello repertoire was going years without new works; rather than a concerto he chose variations in a galant rococo manner. Fitzenhagen reordered and cut the set, and his version long displaced the original. The first performance was given in Moscow on 30 November 1877, with Fitzenhagen as soloist and Nikolai Rubinstein conducting. Tchaikovsky worked on the variations in the same weeks in which his opera Vakula the Smith failed at the Mariinsky Theatre.