rehearsing the pieces I had chosen from my operas with the Prince’s by no means ill-equipped private orchestra, during which my host was invariably present and seemed well satisfied.  Meals were all taken very sociably in common; but on the day of the concert there was a kind of gala-dinner, at which I was astonished to meet Henriette von Bissing, the sister of Mme. Wille of Marienbad, with whom I had been intimate at Zurich.  As she had an estate near Lowenberg, she had also been invited by the Prince, and now gave me proof of her faithful and enthusiastic devotion.  Being both intelligent and witty, she at once became my favourite companion.  After the concert had passed off with reasonable success, I had to fulfil another wish of the Prince’s next day, by privately playing to him Beethoven’s Symphony in C minor, when Frau von Bissing was also present.  She had now been for some time a widow.  She promised to come to Breslau, when I gave my concert there.  Before my departure Conductor Seifriz brought me a fee of four thousand two hundred marks from the Prince, with an expression of regret that for the present it was impossible for him to be more liberal.  After all my previous experiences I was truly astonished and contented, and it was with pleasure I returned the gallant Prince my heartfelt thanks with all the eloquence at my command.

Thence I travelled to Breslau, where the concert director, Damrosch, had arranged a concert for me.  I had made his acquaintance on my last visit to Weimar, and had also heard of him through Liszt.  Unfortunately the conditions here struck me as extraordinarily dismal and desperate.  The whole affair had been planned on the meanest scale, as indeed I might have expected.  A perfectly horrible concert-room, which usually served as a beer-restaurant, had been engaged.  At the rear of this, and separated from it by a dreadfully vulgar curtain, was a small ‘Tivoli’ theatre, for which I was obliged to procure an elevated plank-floor for the orchestra, and the whole concern so disgusted me that my first impulse was to dismiss the seedy-looking musicians on the spot.  My friend Damrosch, who was very much upset, had to promise me that at least he would have the horrible reek of tobacco in the place neutralised.  As he could offer no guarantee as to the amount of the receipts, I was only induced in the end to go on with the enterprise by my desire not to compromise him too severely.  To my amazement I found almost the entire room, at all events the front seats, filled with Jews, and in fact I owed such success as I obtained to the interest excited in this section of the population, as I learned the next day, when I attended a mid-day dinner arranged in my honour by Damrosch, at which again only Jews were present.