Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky
By 1885, Tchaikovsky had tired of travelling around. He rented a country house in Klin, just outside Moscow. He lived a regular life, reading, walking in the forest, composing during the day and playing music with his friends in the evenings. He started to have more confidence as a conductor and toured Europe twice, conducting in Leipzig, Berlin, Prague, Hamburg, Paris and London. In 1889 he finished his second ballet, The Sleeping Beauty and the next year, while staying in Florence, he wrote his famous opera The Queen of Spades based on a story by Pushkin. Later that year Nadezhda von Meck wrote to him that she had lost nearly all her money and could not continue to support him.