off its tens and sometimes hundreds of victims.  He himself was light-hearted and gay then; and having seen what there was to be seen he went back to Leipzig via Prague.  Here he sketched Die Hochzeit; met Dionys Weber, who had known Mozart, and Tomaschek, who had at all events seen Beethoven; and made the acquaintance of Friedrich Kittl, a fat, double-chinned amateur, just blossoming into a full-blown professional musician, who ten years later succeeded Dionys Weber as principal of the Prague conservatoire.

He still had very much to learn.  But an Overture in D minor was performed at the Gewandhaus concerts on February 23, 1832; a Scena and Aria were sung by one Henriette Wuest at a “declamatorium” in the Hoftheater on April 22 of the same year; a C major Overture was given at the Gewandhaus eight days later; on January 10 of the following year the C Symphony was played at the Gewandhaus after being tried by a smaller orchestral society; an Overture to a preposterous play, King Enzio, in which Rosalie took a part, had been played nightly while the piece ran.  I don’t know what the “Scena with Aria” may be; a “declamatorium” seems to be a fine term for a recitation or evening of spouting; the C major Symphony was the last work of Wagner’s to appear on a Gewandhaus programme.  At the same concert Clara Wieck—­afterwards Schumann—­played a piano-concerto by Piscio.  Reinecke’s malicious idiocy need rouse no bitterness now; but I may repeat that under his directorship these concerts earned the contempt of musical Europe as thoroughly as did our own Philharmonic Society.  Until lately, when one mentioned either, every musician laughed:  now both are trying to rehabilitate themselves, without much success.  Both the Philharmonic and the Gewandhaus represented musical vested interests; musicians like Reinecke in Leipzig, and non-musicians like Cusins in London, owed their handsome incomes to the positions into which good-luck had thrust them; and we could hardly expect them to show their publics what much abler men were about.  It was because Reinecke and Cusins (and with him J.W.  Davison of the Times) knew Wagner to be a great musician that they “kept him out” by the simple plan of saying he was not a musician.  It was not the truth, of course, and they knew it was not the truth; but it is too much to expect truth to be considered when solid incomes are at stake.

At the Gewandhaus—­and also at Prague, where Dionys Weber ran through a Beethoven symphony as if it was a Haydn allegro—­Richard got his first lessons in the art of conducting, by a method for which much may be said, that is, he first learnt here how the thing should not be done.  He knew the ninth symphony by heart, and was also entranced by the blended loveliness and strength of Mozart’s symphonies:  played here, all the effects and points he could plainly see in the score disappeared.  He knew better, even thus early, than to think the two great composers capable of writing the kind of academic stuff which looks like music on paper and when played sounds like anything you like excepting music.  He saw that when an orchestra carelessly romped through a movement, paying no heed to expression, to nuances of colour, to tempi, it did not really play, interpret, the music; and soon his convictions bore very remarkable fruit.