With renewed courage I and my agents now followed up our plans, and the necessary preparations for the concerts engaged my whole attention.  I had to look out for a choir, and for this I thought it necessary to reinforce the expensively paid company of the Italian Opera by a German society of singers who had been recommended to me and who were under the direction of a certain Herr Ehmant.  In order to ingratiate myself with its members, I had one evening to visit their meeting-place in the Rue du Temple, and cheerfully accommodate myself to the smell of beer and the fumes of tobacco with which the atmosphere was laden, and in the midst of which sturdy German artists were to reveal their capabilities to me.  I was also brought into contact with a M. Cheve, the teacher and director of a French national choral society, whose rehearsals took place in the Ecole de Medecine.  I there met an odd enthusiast, who, by his method of teaching people to sing without notes, hoped to bring about the regeneration of the French people’s genius.  But the worst trouble was occasioned by the necessity of my having the different orchestral parts of the selections I was going to have played copied out for me.  For this task I hired several poor German musicians, who remained at my house from morning till night, in order to make the necessary arrangements, which were often rather difficult, under my direction.

In the midst of these absorbing occupations Hans von Bulow looked me up.  He had come to Paris for some length of time, as it turned out, more to assist me in my undertaking than to follow his own pursuit as a concert virtuoso.  He was staying with Liszt’s mother, but spent the greater part of the day with me, in order to give help wherever it was needed, as, for instance, with the immediate preparation of the copies.  His activity in all directions was extraordinary, but he seemed, above all, to have set himself the task of making certain social connections, that he and his wife had formed during their visit to Paris the year before, useful to my undertaking.  The result of this was felt in due course, but for the present he helped me to arrange the concerts, the rehearsals for which had begun.

The first of these took place in the Herz Hall, and led to such an agitation on the part of the musicians against me that it was almost as bad as a riot.  I had continually to remonstrate with them about habits on their part, which I on my side felt unable to overlook, and tried to prove, on common-sense grounds, how impossible it was to give way to them.  My 6/8 time, which I took as 4/4 time, particularly incensed them, and with tumultuous protestations they declared it should be taken alla-breva.  In consequence of a sharp call to order and an allusion on my part to the discipline of a well-drilled orchestra, they declared they were not ‘Prussian soldiers,’ but free men.