The performance took place on 2nd January, in the year 1843.  Its result was extremely instructive to me, and led to the turning-point of my career.  The, ill-success of the performance taught me how much care and forethought were essential to secure the adequate dramatic interpretation of my latest works.  I realised that I had more or less believed that my score would explain itself, and that my singers would arrive at the right interpretation of their own accord.  My good old friend Wachter, who at the time of Henriette Sontag’s first success was a favourite ‘Barber of Seville,’ had from the first discreetly thought otherwise.  Unfortunately, even Schroder-Devrient only saw when the rehearsals were too far advanced how utterly incapable Wachter was of realising the horror and supreme suffering of my Mariner.  His distressing corpulence, his broad fat face, the extraordinary movements of his arms and legs, which he managed to make look like mere stumps, drove my passionate Senta to despair.  At one rehearsal, when in the great scene in Act ii. she comes to him in the guise of a guardian angel to bring the message of salvation, she broke off to whisper despairingly in my ear, ’How can I say it when I look into those beady eyes?  Good God, Wagner, what a muddle you have made!’ I consoled her as well as I could, and secretly placed my dependence on Herr von Munchhausen, who promised faithfully to sit that evening in the front row of the stalls, so that Devrient’s eyes must fall on him.  And the magnificent performance of my great artiste, although she stood horribly alone on the stage, did succeed in rousing enthusiasm in the second act.  The first act offered the audience nothing but a dull conversation between Herr Wachter and that Herr Risse who had invited me to an excellent glass of wine on the first night of Rienzi, and in the third the loudest raging of the orchestra did not rouse the sea from its dead calm nor the phantom ship in its cautious rocking.  The audience fell to wondering how I could have produced this crude, meagre, and gloomy work after Rienzi, in every act of which incident abounded, and Tichatschek shone in an endless variety of costumes.

As Schroder-Devrient soon left Dresden for a considerable time, the Fliegender Hollander saw only four performances, at which the diminishing audiences made it plain that I had not pleased Dresden taste with it.  The management was compelled to revive Rienzi in order to maintain my prestige; and the triumph of this opera compared with the failure of the Dutchman gave me food for reflection.  I had to admit, with some misgivings, that the success of my Rienzi was not entirely due to the cast and staging, although I was fully alive to the defects from which the Fliegender Hollander suffered in this respect.  Although Wachter was far from realising my conception of the Fliegender Hollander I could not conceal from myself the fact that Tichatschek was quite as far removed from the