Tchaikovsky
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Vasilii Bessel (1843–1907)

Vasilii Bessel

Russian music publisher, violist and music critic (b. 13/25 April 1843 in Saint Petersburg; d. 1 March 1907 at Zurich), born Vasilii Vasil'evich Bessel (Василий Васильевич Бессель, Vasilij Vasil'jevič Bessel, Vasily Vasil'yevich Bessel).

Bessel was a contemporary of Tchaikovsky's at the Saint Petersburg Conservatory, where he studied the violin with Wienawski and music theory with Nikolai Zaremba, graduating from Ieronim Veikman's viola class in 1865. In November that same year Bessel had performed the viola part at the premiere of Tchaikovsky's String Quartet in B♭ major. From 1866 to 1874 he played the viola in the ballet orchestra of the Imperial Theatres.

In 1869, together with his brother Ivan, he founded the firm V. Bessel & Co. (В. Бессель и Ко.), opening a music shop on the Nevskii Prospekt, which by 1871 had become a thriving publishing house. At this time Bessel commissioned Tchaikovsky to make piano duet arrangements of two orchestral works by Anton Rubinstein (Ivan the Terrible and Don Quixote), and he also offered to publish Tchaikovsky's new opera The Oprichnik (1870–72), which had still not yet been performed; given the failures of his two previous operas, Tchaikovsky was only too happy to accept this proposal, and hastily signed an agreement transferring to Bessel all rights to the work (a move he would later regret).

In 1872 Bessel was granted permission to publish piano transcriptions of Tchaikovsky's overture-fantasia Romeo and Juliet (the full score having been printed by Bote & Bock in Berlin), and the Symphony No. 2, Op. 17 (1872). The delay in issuing the full score of the latter work (which eventually appeared in 1881, after Tchaikovsky had revised the symphony), was one of the two main reasons for the breakdown in relations with Bessel, the other being the rights to The Oprichnik. The only other of the composer's works to be issued by Bessel were the Six Romances (Op. 16) (1872–73), Six Pieces on a Single Theme (Op. 21) (1873), and Six Romances (Op. 25) (1875). Thereafter Tchaikovsky's works were published almost exclusively by Petr Jurgenson in Moscow.

Bessel also published and edited the journals Musical Leaflet (Музыкальный листок) from 1872 to 1877, and published the Music Review (Музыкальное обозрение) from 1885 to 1889. He contributed his own articles to both titles, and also to the German journals Neue allgemeine Musik-Zeitung and Neue Musik-Zeitung (1878–1887). In 1901 he brought out his own book on music publishing—Music matters (Нотное дело).

After Bessel's death in 1907, the firm was managed by his sons Vasilii and Aleksandr. Following the Russian revolution, the firm relocated to Paris in 1920.

Tchaikovsky's correspondence with Vasilii Bessel:

• 56 letters from Tchaikovsky to Vasilii Bessel have survived (including 1 in his capacity as editor of the Musical Review), dating from 1869 to 1891