reading, in which hung a great historical picture by my old friend Pecht, portraying Goethe as a young man reading the first fragments of his Faust before the Grand Duke’s ancestors.  My work received very kind attention, and at the conclusion of the reading I was exceedingly pleased to hear the Grand Duchess recommend me particularly to find a suitable musical setting for the excellent part of Pogner, which was a friendly admission of regret that a citizen should be more zealous in the interests of art than many a prince.  A performance of Lohengrin, under my conductorship, was once more discussed, and I was advised to make fresh terms with Eduard Devrient.  Unfortunately the latter made a terrible impression on me by his production of Tannhauser at the theatre.  I was obliged to witness this performance seated by his side, and was astonished to realise that this ‘Dramaturge,’ whom I had hitherto so highly recommended, had now sunk to the most vulgar practices of the theatrical profession.  To my amazement at the monstrous mistakes made in the performance, he replied, with great surprise and a certain haughty indignation, that he could not understand why I made so much fuss about such trifles, as I must know very well that in theatres it was impossible to do otherwise.  Nevertheless, a model performance of Lohengrin was arranged for the following summer, with the co-operation of Herr Schnorr and his wife.

A much pleasanter impression was made upon me by a play I saw at the Frankfort theatre, where, in passing through that town, I saw a pretty comedy, in which the delicate and tender acting of Friederike Meyer, the sister of my Vienna singer, Mme. Dustmann, impressed me more than any German acting had ever done.  I now began to calculate on the possibility of making suitable friends in the neighbourhood of Biebrich, so as not to be entirely dependent on the Schott family or on my hotel-keeper for society.  I had already looked up the Raff family in Wiesbaden, where Frau Raff had an engagement at the court theatre.  She was a sister of Emilie Genast, with whom I had been on friendly terms during my stay in Weimar.  One excellent piece of information I heard about her was that by extraordinary thrift and good management she had succeeded in raising her husband’s position of careless wastefulness to a flourishing and prosperous one.  Raff himself, who by his own accounts of his dissipated life under Liszt’s patronage, had led me to regard him as an eccentric genius, at once disabused me of this idea when, on a closer acquaintance, I found him an uncommonly uninteresting and insipid man, full of self-conceit, but without any power of taking a wide outlook on the world.

Taking advantage of the prosperous condition to which he had attained, thanks to his wife, he considered he was entitled to patronise me by giving me some friendly advice in regard to my position at the time.  He thought it advisable to tell me that I ought in my dramatic compositions to pay more attention to the reality of things, and to illustrate his meaning he pointed to my score of Tristan as an abortion of idealistic extravagances.