in the town.  Besides this, my wife interfered in the matter, and the singers who played Tannhauser and Wolfram at once put themselves under her wing.  She really succeeded, too, in working on my humanitarian feelings with regard to one of her proteges, a poor tenor who had been badly bullied by the conductor till then.  I took these people through their parts a few times, and in consequence found myself obliged to attend the stage rehearsals to superintend their performances.  What it all came to in the end was that I was driven to interfere again and again, until I found myself at the conductor’s desk, and eventually conducted the first performance myself.  I have a particularly vivid recollection of the singer who played Elizabeth on that occasion.  She had originally taken soubrette parts, and went through her role in white kid gloves, dangling a fan.  This time I had really had enough of such concessions, and when at the close the audience called me before the curtain, I stood there and told my friends with great frankness that this was the last time they would get me to do anything of the sort.  I advised them in future to look to the state of their theatre, as they had just had a most convincing proof of its faulty construction—­at which they were all much astonished.  I made a similar announcement to the ‘Musikgesellschaft,’ where I also conducted once more—­really for the last time—­before my departure.  Unfortunately, they put down my protests to my sense of humour, and were not in the least spurred to exert themselves, with the result that I had to be very stern and almost rude the following winter, to deter them, once and for all, from making further demands upon me.  I thus left my former patrons in Zurich somewhat nonplussed when I started for London on 26th February.

I travelled through Paris and spent some days there, during which time I saw only Kietz and his friend Lindemann (whom he regarded as a quack doctor).  Arriving in London on 2nd March I first went to see Ferdinand Prager.  In his youth he had been a friend of the Rockel brothers, who had given me a very favourable account of him.  He proved to be an unusually good-natured fellow, though of an excitability insufficiently balanced by his standard of culture.  After spending the first night at his home, I installed myself the following day with his help in a house in Portland Terrace, in the neighbourhood of Regent’s Park, of which I had agreeable recollections from former visits.  I promised myself a pleasant stay there in the coming spring, if only on account of its close proximity to that part of the park where beautiful copper beeches over-shadowed the path.  But though I spent four months in London, it seemed to me that spring never came, the foggy climate so overclouded all the impressions I received.  Prager was only too eager to escort me when I went to pay the customary visits, including one to Costa.  I was thus introduced to the director of the Italian Opera, who was at the same time the real leader of music in London; for he was also director of the Sacred-Music Society, which gave almost regular weekly performances of Handel and Mendelssohn.