in Siegfried, for his presence at least gave an appearance of song, while the orchestra alone undertookthe effective reality.  On the conclusion of my two concerts for the Philharmonic Society, I set seriously to work on my own concert, which was to be held in the Imperial Opera House, in the material arrangements for which I was helped by a retired musician.  This man often spent hours with Seroff in my well-heated rooms without laying aside his enormous fur coat, and as his incapacity gave us a great deal of trouble, we agreed that he was like ’the sheep in wolf’s clothing.’  The concert, however, succeeded beyond all my expectations, and I do not think I was ever so enthusiastically received by any audience as on this occasion.  Indeed, their greeting when I first appeared was so loudly prolonged that I felt quite touched, a rare occurrence with me.  To this wild abandonment on the part of the audience the ardent devotion of my orchestra naturally contributed, as my one hundred and twenty musicians renewed the frantic acclamations again and again, a procedure which appeared to be quite novel in St. Petersburg.  From some of them I heard such exclamations as, ’We must admit we have never known what music is till now.’

Conductor Schuberth, who, with a certain amount of condescension, had helped me with advice on business matters, now utilised this favourable turn of affairs to ask for my co-operation at a concert to be given shortly for his own benefit.  Although I was fully aware that by this means he reckoned on conjuring a handsome profit out of my pocket into his own, yet on the advice of my friends I thought it best to comply with his request, albeit much against the grain.  So a week later I repeated the most popular items of my programme before an equally numerous audience and with the same success, but this time the handsome receipts of three thousand roubles were destined for an invalid man, who as a retribution for this encroachment on my rights was suddenly summoned to another world in the same year.

To balance this, I now had a prospect of further artistic and material successes from a contract concluded with General Lwoff, the manager of the Moscow theatre.  I was to give three concerts in the Grand Theatre, of which I was to have half the receipts, guaranteed in each case at a minimum of one thousand roubles.  I arrived there suffering from a cold, miserable and ill at ease, in weather which was a mixture of frost and thaw, and put up at a badly situated German boarding-house.  My preliminary arrangements were made with the manager, who, in spite of the orders hanging from his neck, looked a very insignificant person, and the difficult selection of the vocal items had to be arranged with a Russian tenor and a superannuated Italian lady-singer.  Having settled these, I entered upon the task of orchestral rehearsals.  It was here that I first met the younger Rubinstein, Anton’s brother Nicholas, who, as director of the Russian Musical Society, was