Nikolai Zaremba

His wife and daughters moved to Clarens, Switzerland, near Montreux, with many of his compositions, which were given to Basel University and traced in 2010.

Zaremba's life and work was studied by Andrey Alexeev-Boretsky, a librarian and musicologist at the St. Peterburg conservatory.

Along with Anton Rubinstein, and opposed to the forward-looking and nationalist tendencies of The Five, Zaremba remained suspicious, even hostile, to new trends in music.

[5] According to Herman Laroche Zaremba idolized Beethoven, particularly the late works, but his personal tastes had progressed no further than Mendelssohn.

If anyone were to ask him about Hector Berlioz, Robert Schumann or, closer to home, Mikhail Glinka Zaremba would probably have had to admit to knowing nothing.

[6] Tchaikovsky biographer David Brown writes that Zaremba's chief deficit was a complete lack of true inventiveness musically or of any other sort of imagination.

Sticking to the composition handbook of his teacher, Adolph Bernhard Marx, Zaremba sent his students from there to study strict counterpoint and church modes as explained by Heinrich Bellermann.

He reportedly wrote at least one symphony, a quartet in the style of Joseph Haydn, according to Tchaikovsky, and an oratorio entitled John the Baptist.

This lack of compositional output may have contributed to the undistinguished opinion held generally about Zaremba, a viewpoint Tchaikovsky ultimately shared as well.