The atmosphere created by this conviction now weighed with increasing pressure upon everything which was undertaken for the preparation of a performance which was postponed time after time.  With the beginning of the year the rehearsals had readied the stage at which the scenes were arranged and the orchestral practices begun.  Everything was conducted with a care which impressed me very agreeably at the beginning, until finally I was bored by it, because I saw that the powers of the performers were being relaxed by eternal repetition, and it was now evident that I must trust to my own ability to pull the matter quickly through as I thought best.  But it was not the fatigue due to this system that finally made Niemann, the main prop in my work, recoil from the task which at the start he had undertaken with an energy full of promise.  He had been informed that there was a conspiracy to ruin my work.  From this time forward he was a victim to a despondency to which, in his relations with me, he sought to lend a sort of diabolical character.  He maintained that so far he could only see the matter in a black light, and he brought forward some arguments that sounded very sensible; he criticised the whole Opera as an institution and the public attached to it, and also our staff of singers, of whom he maintained that not a single one understood his part as I intended it; and he exposed all the disadvantages of the undertaking, which I myself could not fail to see as soon as I came to deal with the chef du chant, the regisseur, the ballet-master, the conductor of the chorus, but, particularly, with the chef d’orchestre.  Above all, Niemann (who at the beginning, with a full knowledge of what it involved, had imposed upon himself the task of playing his part without curtailments of any sort) insisted upon cutting down the score.  He met my expression of astonishment with the remark, that I must not suppose that the sacrifice of this or that passage mattered, but that we were in the throes of an undertaking which could not be got through too quickly.

Under circumstances from which so little encouragement could be derived, the study of Tannhauser dragged itself along to the brink of the so-called ‘dress’ rehearsals.  From all sides the friends of my past life gathered together in Paris to be present at the apotheosis of the first performance.  Among these were Otto Wesendonck, Ferdinand Prager, the unfortunate Kietz, for whom I had to pay the costs of his journey and of his stay in Paris; luckily M. Chandon from Epernay came, too, with a hamper of ‘Fleur du Jardin,’ the finest of all his champagne brands.  This was to be drunk to the success of Tannhauser.  Bulow also came, depressed and saddened by the burdens of his own life, and hoping to be able to gather courage and renewed vitality from the success of my undertaking.  I did not dare to tell him in so many words of the miserable state of affairs; on the contrary, seeing him so depressed, I made the best of a bad matter.