While I was staying with my relatives I played and sang them the Fliegender Hollander for the first time connectedly, and seemed to arouse considerable interest by my performance, for when, later on, my sister Louisa heard the opera in Dresden, she complained that much of the effect previously produced by my rendering did not come back to her.  I also sought out my old friend Apel again.  The poor man had gone stone blind, but he astonished me by his cheeriness and contentment, and thereby once and for all deprived me of any reason for pitying him.  As he declared that he knew the blue coat I was wearing very well, though it was really a brown one, I thought it best not to argue the point, and I left Leipzig in a state of wonder at finding every one there so happy and contented.

When I reached Dresden, on 26th April, I found occasion to grapple more vigorously with my lot.  Here I was enlivened by closer intercourse with the people on whom I had to rely for a successful production of Rienzi.  It is true that the results of my interviews with Luttichau, the general manager, and Reissiger, the musical conductor, left me cold and incredulous.  Both were sincerely astonished at my arrival in Dresden; and the same might even be said of my frequent correspondent and patron, Hofrath Winkler, who also would have preferred my remaining in Paris.  But, as has been my constant experience both before and since, help and encouragement have always come to me from humbler and never from the more exalted ranks of life.

So in this case, too, I met my first agreeable sensation in the overwhelmingly cordial reception I received from the old chorus-master, Wilhelm Fischer.  I had had no previous acquaintance with him, yet he was the only person who had taken the trouble to read my score carefully, and had not only conceived serious hopes for the success of my opera, but had worked energetically to secure its being accepted and practised.  The moment I entered his room and told him my name, he rushed to embrace me with a loud cry, and in a second I was translated to an atmosphere of hope.  Besides this man, I met in the actor Ferdinand Heine and his family another sure foundation for hearty and, indeed, deep-rooted friendship.  It is true that I had known him from childhood, for at that time he was one of the few young people whom my stepfather Geyer liked to see about him.  In addition to a fairly decided talent for drawing, it was chiefly his pleasant social gifts that had won him an entrance into our more intimate family circle.  As he was very small and slight, my stepfather nicknamed him DavidCHEN, and under this appellation he used to take part with great affability and good-humour in our little festivities, and above all in our friendly excursions into the neighbouring country, in which, as I mentioned in its place, even Carl Maria von Weber used to join.  Belonging to the good old school, he had become a useful, if not prominent, member of the Dresden stage.  He possessed all the knowledge and qualities for a good stage manager, but never succeeded in inducing the committee to give him that appointment.  It was only as a designer of costumes that he found further scope for his talents, and in this capacity he was included in the consultations over the staging of Rienzi.