The frame of mind in which I looked forward to the first performance of my work was a unique experience which I have never felt either before or since.  My kind sister Clara fully shared my feelings.  She had been living a wretched middle-class life at Chemnitz, which, just about this time, she had left to come and share my fate in Dresden.  The poor woman, whose undoubted artistic gifts had faded so early, was laboriously dragging out a commonplace bourgeois existence as a wife and mother; but now, under the influence of my growing success, she began joyously to breathe a new life.  She and I and the worthy chorus-master Fischer used to spend our evenings with the Heine family, still over potatoes and herrings, and often in a wonderfully elated frame of mind.  The evening before our first performance I was able to crown our happiness by myself ladling out a bowl of punch.  With mingled tears and laughter we skipped about like happy children, and then in sleep prepared ourselves for the triumphant day to which we looked forward with such confidence..

Although on the morning of 20th October, 1842 I had resolved not to disturb any of my singers by a visit, yet I happened to come across one of them, a stiff Philistine called Risse, who was playing a minor bass part in a dull but respectable way.  The day was rather cool, but wonderfully bright and sunshiny, after the gloomy weather we had just been having.  Without a word this curious creature saluted me and then remained standing, as though bewitched.  He simply gazed into my face with wonder and rapture, in order to find out, so he at last managed to tell me in strange confusion, how a man looked who that very day was to face such an exceptional fate.  I smiled and reflected that it was indeed a day of crisis, and promised him that I would soon drink a glass with him, at the Stadt Hamburg inn, of the excellent wine he had recommended to me with so much agitation.

No subsequent experience of mine can be compared with the sensations which marked the day of the first production of Rienzi.  At all the first performances of my works in later days, I have been so absorbed by an only too well-founded anxiety as to their success, that I could neither enjoy the opera nor form any real estimate of its reception by the public.  As for my subsequent experiences at the general rehearsal of Tristan und Isolde, this took place under such exceptional circumstances, and its effect upon me differed so fundamentally from that produced by the first performance of Rienzi, that no comparison can possibly be drawn between the two.