life in it, aiming only at political harangue, and had shared the inevitable fate of all such aberrations.  He had therefore awaited the appearance of my Rienzi with some vexation, and confessed to me his bitter chagrin at not being able to procure the acceptance of his tragedy of the same name in Dresden.  This, he presumed, arose from its somewhat pronounced political tendency, which, certainly in a spoken play on a similar subject, would be more noticeable than in an opera, where from the very start no one pays any heed to the words.  I had genially confirmed him in this depreciation of the subject matter in opera; and was therefore the more startled when, on finding him at my sister Louisa’s the day after the first performance, he straightway overwhelmed me with a scornful outburst of irritation at my success.  But he found in me a strange sense of the essential unreality in opera of such a subject as that which I had just illustrated with so much success in Rienzi, so that, oppressed by a secret sense of shame, I had no serious rejoinder to offer to his candidly poisonous abuse.  My line of defence was not yet sufficiently clear in my own mind to be available offhand, nor was it yet backed by so obvious a product of my own peculiar genius that I could venture to quote it.  Moreover, my first impulse was only one of pity for the unlucky playwright, which I felt all the more constrained to express, because his burst of fury gave me the inward satisfaction of knowing that he recognised my great success, of which I was not yet quite clear myself.

But this first performance of Rienzi did far more than this.  It gave occasion for controversy, and made an ever-widening breach between myself and the newspaper critics.  Herr Karl Bank, who for some time had been the chief musical critic in Dresden, had been known to me before at Magdeburg, where he once visited me and listened with delight to my playing of several fairly long passages from my Liebesverbot.  When we met again in Dresden, this man could not forgive me for having been unable to procure him tickets for the first performance of Rienzi.  The same thing happened with a certain Herr Julius Schladebach, who likewise settled in Dresden about that time as a critic.  Though I was always anxious to be gracious to everybody, yet I felt just then an invincible repugnance for showing special deference to any man because he was a critic.  As time went on, I carried this rule to the point of almost systematic rudeness, and was consequently all my life through the victim of unprecedented persecution from the press.  As yet, however, this ill-will had not become pronounced, for at that time journalism had not begun to give itself airs in Dresden.  There were so few contributions sent from there to the outside press that our artistic doings excited very little notice elsewhere, a fact which was certainly not without its disadvantages for me.  Thus for the present the unpleasant side of my success scarcely affected me at all, and for a brief space I felt myself, for the first and only time in my life, so pleasantly borne along on the breath of general good-will, that all my former troubles seemed amply requited.