the capacity of a linen-draper.  This pleased Liszt; and, indeed, I now made my way, by means of the summer theatre on the Lerchenfeld, into the capital of the Austrian empire.  Of the performance itself the most wonderful accounts reached me.  Sulzer, who on one of his journeys had passed through Vienna and had witnessed a performance, had complained principally of the darkness of the house, which did not allow him to read a single word of the libretto, also of its having rained hard right into the middle of the audience.  Another story was told me some years later by the son-in-law of Mme. Herold, the widow of the composer of that name.  He had been in Vienna at that period on his wedding tour, and had heard this Lerchenfeld performance.  The young man assured me that, in spite of all superficial deficiencies, the production there had given him genuine pleasure, and had been more deeply impressive than the performance in the Berlin Court Theatre, which he had seen afterwards, and found immeasurably inferior.  The energy of my old Riga Theatre director in Vienna brought me in two thousand francs for twenty performances of Tannhauser.  After such a curious experience, offering clear proof of my popularity, I may perhaps be excused for having felt confident about the future, and having relied on incalculable results from my works, even with regard to actual gain.

While I was thus occupied in arranging the little country house for which I had longed so much, and working on the orchestration of the first act of Siegfried, I plunged anew into the philosophy of Schopenhauer and into Scott’s novels, to which I was drawn with a particular affection.  I also busied myself with elucidating my impressions of Liszt’s compositions.  For this purpose I adopted the form of a letter to Marie Wittgenstein, which was published in Brendel’s musical journal.

When we moved to what I intended to be my permanent refuge for life, I again set myself to consider the means of obtaining a basis for the supply of the necessities of that life.  Once again I took up the threads of my negotiations with Hartel about the Nibelungen, but I was obliged to put them down as unfruitful, and little calculated to end in any success for this work.  I complained of this to Liszt, and openly told him how glad I should be if he would bring this to the ears of the Grand Duke of Weimar (who, from what my friend told me, wished himself still to be regarded as the patron of my Nibelungen enterprise), so that he might realise the difficulties I was encountering in the matter.  I added that if one could not expect a common bookseller to assume the responsibility of such an extraordinary undertaking, one might well hope that the Prince, whose idea was to make it a point of honour, should take a share, and a serious share, in the necessary preliminaries, among which the development of the work itself must very properly be included.  My meaning was, that the Grand Duke should take the place of Hartel, should purchase the work from me, and pay by instalments as the score neared completion; he would thus become the owner, and, later on, could if he liked cover his expenses through a publisher.  Liszt understood me very well, but could not refrain from dissuading me from taking up such an attitude towards his Royal Highness.