Weber had occupied?  Nevertheless, things soon came to pass which show how the Richard who set off from Pillau to Paris with his bare travelling expenses, and the Richard who was to do yet madder things hereafter, was the Richard of this middle period.  This von Luettichau said it was the rule of the court that a new conductor should serve a year on trial.  Wagner was quite brutally reminded that the mighty Weber had been compelled to do so; and he was told he must do so.  He point-blank refused; sent the Luettichau man a long explanation—­which, I dare say, was never read—­of why he couldn’t accept such terms; spoke of the necessity of getting some sort of order and discipline into an orchestra which Reissiger had allowed to go to pieces, etc., etc.  But he had to his credit, as we have seen, the triumphs of Rienzi and the Dutchman; and it shows how much he was wanted that Luettichau yielded; he waived the twelve months’ probation without murmuring—­a thing almost unheard of in the case of a German official, a German court official.  So on the 2nd of February, 1843, he was sworn in “for life” as co-conductor with Reissiger; and promptly learnt that he had to wear a livery like others condemned to penal servitude for life.  This was the least of his troubles.

Reissiger had been the slackest of theatre conductors, the slackest of the slack old school.  I may have mentioned that once I had the misfortune to play the piano part in a number of his trios; and though these are the only compositions of his known to me they suffice.  A man who had the patience to plod through the task of writing such dreary stuff and the presumption to send it forth to a world already familiar with Mendelssohn’s trios, if not with Beethoven’s, cannot have had a spark of the genuine, enthusiastic musician in him.  His waltz—­known as “Weber’s last thoughts,” in Germany and England as “Weber’s last waltz”—­must have been the fruit of a lucky accident—­or perhaps he did have a moment of inspiration:  it would be hard if that had not come once in a lifetime to a man who wrote so much.  The little thing is certainly pretty.  But it is not enough to counteract the impression made by his trios on me, nor by his operas and conducting-work on Wagner.  The latter, indeed, was fond of telling anecdotes showing how entirely indifferent Reissiger was to his work, so long as he got through it somehow, reached home in good time, and drew his pay regularly.  One story, though well enough known, ought to be mentioned, because it reveals the man whose duties Wagner had to share, and the result of whose faults Wagner had to cure and efface.  Wagner met Reissiger on the river bridge one evening at nine o’clock, when the opera ought to have been in full swing with Reissiger at the conductor’s desk.  “Are you not conducting the opera to-night?” asked Wagner—­possibly in a fit of consternation, thinking it might be his night.  “Have had it,” Reissiger replied;