She is best known today for her artistic relationship with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky, supporting him financially for thirteen years, so that he could devote himself full-time to composition, while stipulating that they were never to meet.
Her father, Filaret Frolovsky, embraced her love of music from an early age, while from her mother, Anastasia Dimitryevna Potemkina, she learned energy, determination, and business acumen.
She also mastered some foreign languages, learned to appreciate the visual arts, and read widely in literature, history, and philosophy, especially the work of Arthur Schopenhauer and the Russian idealist Vladimir Solovyov.
To her, filling the roles of mother, nurse, governess, dressmaker, housekeeper, and valet was far easier to bear than the humiliation of seeing her husband as a cog in the machine of a government organization.
Russia, desperately short of railways, was expanding its communications network rapidly, and Nadezhda was far-sighted enough to see that a future for her husband lay there.
Meck finally gave in to his wife's urgings and resigned from the civil service, at which point they had an income of only twenty kopecks a day on which to live.
In 1876, Karl von Meck died suddenly, leaving a will which gave Nadezhda control of his vast financial holdings.
Understandably, her children were not always grateful for the extreme degree of their mother's care (or meddling, depending on the viewpoint of the person concerned).
She wrote to Tchaikovsky, I am very unsympathetic in my personal relations because I do not possess any femininity whatever; second, I do not know how to be tender, and this characteristic has passed on to my entire family.
Her views on affairs of the heart were strictly moral, but she did not believe in marriage as a social institution and regularly professed her hatred of it to Tchaikovsky.
"[2] On another occasion, she stated more genially but no less forcefully, "The distribution of rights and obligations as determined by social laws I find speculative and immoral.
"[2] Even with her views on matrimony, von Meck was resigned to it as a means of social stability and procreation, and her own marital experience may have forced her to recognize its benefits.
[citation needed] Russian radical thinkers of the period, such as Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Dmitry Pisarev, espoused views not far removed from hers.
[citation needed] With her great wealth and her passion for music, von Meck became a major mover in the Russian performing arts.
The sole exception to her general reclusiveness was the series of Russian Musical Society concerts given in Moscow, which she attended incognito, sitting alone in the balcony.
While her husband was still alive, von Meck began actively supporting and promoting young musicians, several of whom she continually employed, living in her household and playing her favorite works.
As their relationship developed, she subsequently provided him with an allowance of 6,000 rubles a year, large enough that he could leave his professorship at the Moscow Conservatory to focus on creative work full-time.
[citation needed] Von Meck remained a devoted supporter of Tchaikovsky and all his works, but her bond with him depended on not meeting him.
Tchaikovsky understood this, writing to Meck, "You are quite right, Nadezhda Filaretovna, to suppose that I am of a disposition sympathetic to your own unusual spiritual feelings, which I understand completely.
[9] The previous year, while staying at her villa in Florence, Tchaikovsky had seen her and her entourage pass by every morning;[10] and they also glimpsed each other once at the opera, but only from a distance.
Meck, who was in Cannes at the time, did not attend the wedding, thus staying true to her custom of avoiding all contact with the families of her children's spouses.
Rather than bringing von Meck and Tchaikovsky closer together, Anna and Nikolai's union may have helped drive a wedge between them.
Tchaikovsky virtually disowned his niece in an effort to avert a falling-out, while Meck hid from him her true feelings about what was taking place.
[citation needed] In October 1890, von Meck sent Tchaikovsky a year's allowance in advance, along with a letter ending her patronage.
Nevertheless, one logical explanation of giving him a year's allowance at once would be that she feared not having the funds to send later, in their usual arrangement of monthly installments.
Instead, he stated his opinion that what had been to Tchaikovsky the unique and mutual relationship of two friends had been for Meck merely the passing fancy of a wealthy woman.
The Tchaikovsky biographer David Brown maintains that Galina's account "contains much hearsay and a good deal that is romantically heightened."
The problem of the debts was compounded by the financial mismanagement of Nadezhda von Meck's business affairs by her son Vladimir.
Von Meck died from tuberculosis on January 13, 1894 in Nice, in the south of France, two months after Tchaikovsky's demise.
"[17] In 1985 Galina von Meck donated to Columbia University a collection including her translation of 681 letters written by Tchaikovsky to his family.