By the 1870s instrumental compositions of quality were emerging in a steady flow from the music-rooms of several composers. Symphonies written in this decade include the second, third and fourth of Tchaikovsky, Rimsky-Korsakov's third and Borodin's second. Tchaikovsky wrote his concertos for piano and violin, both first performed abroad (in Boston and Vienna respectively). Borodin heard his First String Quartet (and the Polovtsian Dances) performed for the first time. Musorgsky wrote Pictures from an Exhibition and added to his earlier songs The Nursery cycle, the Songs and Dances of Death, and the Sunless cycle. It has been impossible to find worthwhile contemporary responses to works which are now among his best known – such as the Songs and Dances and Pictures – so novel was his approach to music and so unsystematic his attitude towards arranging public performances. Tchaikovsky, on the other hand, had retrieved Russian ballet music from specialist composers of little flair, inaugurating with Swan Lake a line which led via the scores of Glazunov to the elevation of ballet to a far higher place in the hierarchy of the arts through the work of Diaghilev.

(a) G. A. Laroche: A new Russian symphony. Moscow Bulletin, 7, February 1873, no. 33, p. 3. Laroche 2, pp. 34–8