Richard’s health was in no way injured by the breakdown of the negotiations.  His letters of the period are as buoyant as could be wished.  He had other schemes.  At the Freemasons’ concerts his Die Feen overture made a hit.  He heard Schroeder-Devrient in Bellini’s Montechi e Capuleti, and found to his astonishment that a great singer could create great artistic effects in music of no very high value.  He had many friends, and amongst them Schumann and Heinrich Laube—­the latter a free-thinking journalist whose utterances so scared the government-by-police, as tending to make people think for themselves instead of peacefully submitting to be governed, that he was put in prison.  He was editor of a paper called the Zeitung fuer die Elegante Welt—–­ a curious title for a journal which frequently praised the democratic Richard.  In the summer of 1834 he went for another holiday, this time to Teplitz, where he sketched Das Liebesverbot, his second opera to get finished and the first to be performed—­performed, by the way, in a very unusual fashion.  Obviously his spirits were not damped:  obviously, also, the family which is supposed not to have assisted him assisted him to the extent, at any rate, of enabling him to take a holiday he could not pay for.  He had as yet not earned sufficient for his travelling expenses from Leipzig to Wuerzburg and back, to say nothing of holiday trips.  As on this trip he planned Das Liebesverbot his thanks were due to his family for being able to begin that work.  It is true he had Apel as a friend, but he had not yet formed the habit of borrowing right and left, nor is there any hint in his correspondence of Apel having paid his expenses.

I wish now to pass rapidly over two fresh adventures—­the conductorship at Magdeburg and that at Koenigsberg; but first let me point out how the boy’s was changing to a man’s character.  It is plain that he worked very hard at Wuerzburg, for the score of Die Feen is a big one, and teaching his chorus must have occupied many hours a day.  It is equally plain that he set to work with the greatest vigour on the new opera.  Now, Nietzsche declared that Wagner by sheer will and energy “made himself a musician.”  That is pure nonsense; but it points to an important characteristic—­namely, Wagner did not, even at the age of twenty, trust to inspiration alone, as with his hot and impulsive nature we might have expected, but also to unremitting work.  For the remaining fifty years of his life the labours of each day were almost incredible.

IV