had set sail for Travemunde when an unfavourable wind set in, and held up our departure for a week:  I had to spend this disagreeable time in a miserable ship’s tavern.  Thrown on my own resources I tried, amongst other things, to read Till Eulenspiegel, and this popular book first gave me the idea of a real German comic opera.  Long afterwards, when I was composing the words for my Junger Siegfried, I remember having many vivid recollections of this melancholy sojourn in Travemunde and my reading of Till Eulenspiegel.  After a voyage of four days we at last reached port at Bolderaa.  I was conscious of a peculiar thrill on coming into contact with Russian officials, whom I had instinctively detested since the days of my sympathy with the Poles as a boy.  It seemed to me as if the harbour police must read enthusiasm for the Poles in my face, and would send me to Siberia on the spot, and I was the more agreeably surprised, on reaching Riga, to find myself surrounded by the familiar German element which, above all, pervaded everything connected with the theatre.

After my unfortunate experiences in connection with the conditions of small German stages, the way in which this newly opened theatre was run had at first a calming effect on my mind.  A society had been formed by a number of well-to-do theatre-goers and rich business men to raise, by voluntary subscription, sufficient money to provide the sort of management they regarded as ideal with a solid foundation.  The director they appointed was Karl von Holtei, a fairly popular dramatic writer, who enjoyed a certain reputation in the theatrical world.  This man’s ideas about the stage represented a special tendency, which was at that time on the decline.  He possessed, in addition to his remarkable social gifts, an extraordinary acquaintance with all the principal people connected with the theatre during the past twenty years, and belonged to a society called Die Liebenswurdigen Libertins (’The Amiable Libertines’).  This was a set of young would-be wits, who looked upon the stage as a playground licensed by the public for the display of their mad pranks, from which the middle class held aloof, while people of culture were steadily losing all interest in the theatre under these hopeless conditions.

Holtei’s wife had in former days been a popular actress at the Konigstadt theatre in Berlin, and it was here, at the time when Henriette Sontag raised it to the height of its fame, that Holtei’s style had been formed.  The production there of his melodrama Leonore (founded on Burger’s ballad) had in particular earned him a wide reputation as a writer for the stage, besides which he produced some Liederspiele, and among them one, entitled Der Alte Feldherr, became fairly popular.  His invitation to Riga had been particularly welcome, as it bid fair to gratify his craving to absorb himself completely in the life of the stage; he hoped, in this out-of-the-way place, to indulge his passion without restraint.