with some splendour, and a swarm of musicians soon filled the place, among them my old acquaintance Drasecke and a certain young man called Weisheimer, whom Liszt had once sent to see me at Zurich.  Tausig put in an appearance too, but excluded himself from most of our free and easy gatherings to carry on a love-affair with a young lady.  Liszt gave me Emilie Genast as a companion on one or two short excursions, an arrangement with which I found no fault, as she was witty and very intelligent.  I made the acquaintance of Damrosch too, a violinist and a musician.  It was a great pleasure to see my old friend Alwine Frommann, who had come in spite of her somewhat strained relations with Liszt; and when Blandine and Ollivier arrived from Paris and became my neighbours on the Altenburg, the days which were lively before to begin with, now became boisterously merry.  Bulow, who had been chosen to conduct Liszt’s Faust Symphony, seemed to me the wildest of all.  His activity was extraordinary.  He had learned the entire score by heart, and gave us an unusually precise, intelligent, and spirited performance with an orchestra composed of anything but the pick of German players.  After this symphony the Prometheus music had the greatest success, while I was particularly affected by Emilie Genast’s singing of a song-cycle, composed by Bulow, called Die Entsagende.  There was little else that was enjoyable at the festival concert with the exception of a cantata, Das Grab im Busento by Weisheimer, and a regular scandal arose in connection with Drasecke’s ‘German March.’  For some obscure reason Liszt adopted a challenging and protecting attitude towards this strange composition, written apparently in mockery by a man of great talent in other directions.  Liszt insisted on Bulow’s conducting the march, and ultimately Hans made a success of it, even doing it by heart; but the whole thing ended in the following incredible scene.  The jubilant reception of Liszt’s own works had not once induced him to show himself to the audience, but when Drasecke’s march, which concluded the programme, was at last rejected by the audience in an irresistible wave of ill-humour, Liszt came into the stage-box and, stretching out his hands, clapped vigorously and shouted ‘Bravos.’  A real battle set in between Liszt, whose face was red with anger, and the audience.  Blandine, who was sitting next to me, was, like me, beside herself at this outrageously provocative behaviour on the part of her father, and it was a long time before we could compose ourselves after the incident.  There was little in the way of explanation to be got out of Liszt.  We only heard him refer a few times, in terms of furious contempt, to the audience, ’for whom the march was far and away too good.’  I heard from another quarter that this was a form of revenge on the regular Weimar public, but it was a strange way of wreaking it, as they were not represented on this occasion.  Liszt thought it was a good opportunity to avenge Cornelius, whose opera The Barber