The Conservatoire, with student forces, is putting on an opera by a student, Galkovsky: The Gypsies, along with Cui's short opera The Snow Prince. As I predicted, The Gypsies is terrible. It has practically no material to speak of, and contains so little of interest that one can only pray for deliverance from it! It does have two beautiful but unrelated leitmotivs: Aleko's and the betrayal theme, but the main Gypsies theme has simply been plagiarized and the rest is all either dull or stolen, and sometimes both. I have already had some intercourse with the composer, but it has usually ended with him getting angry and walking away. I hear that Glazunov, Klimov and the rest, in fact all concerned, are unhappy with the opera except for [Nikolai Rimsky-] Korsakov who loves it and knows it practically by heart. There is no man so wise that he cannot make a fool of himself!