Nevertheless, the decision came as a kind of surprise.  On 2nd February 1843 I was very politely invited to the director’s office, and there met the general staff of the royal orchestra, in whose presence Luttichau, through the medium of my never-to-be-forgotten friend Winkler, solemnly read out to me a royal rescript appointing me forthwith conductor to his Majesty, with a life salary of four thousand five hundred marks a year.  Luttichau followed the reading of this document by a more or less ceremonious speech, in which he assumed that I should gratefully accept the King’s favour.  At this polite ceremony it did not escape my notice that all possibility of future negotiations over the figure of the salary was cut off; on the other hand, a substantial exemption in my favour, the omission of the condition, enforced even on Weber in his time, of serving a year’s probation under the title of mere musical director, was calculated to secure my unconditional acceptance.  My new colleagues congratulated me, and Luttichau accompanied me with the politest phrases to my own door, where I fell into the arms of my poor wife, who was giddy with delight.  Therefore I fully realised that I must put the best face I could on the matter, and unless I wished to give unheard-of offence, I must even congratulate myself on my appointment as royal conductor.

A few days after taking the oath as a servant of the King in solemn session, and undergoing the ceremony of presentation to the assembled orchestra by means of an enthusiastic speech from the general director, I was summoned to an audience with his Majesty.  When I saw the features of the kind, courteous, and homely monarch, I involuntarily thought of my youthful attempt at a political overture on the theme of Friedrich und Freiheit.  Our somewhat embarrassed conversation brightened with the King’s expression of his satisfaction with those two of my operas which had been performed in Dresden.  He expressed with polite hesitation his feeling that if my operas left anything to be desired, it was a clearer definition of the various characters in my musical dramas.  He thought the interest in the persons was overpowered by the elemental forces figuring beside them—­in Hienzi the mob, in the Fliegender Hollander the sea.  I thought I understood his meaning perfectly, and this proof of his sincere sympathy and original judgment pleased me very much.  He also made his excuses in advance for a possible rare attendance at my operas on his part, his sole reason for this being that he had a peculiar aversion from theatre-going, as the result of one of the rules of his early training, under which he and his brother John, who had acquired a similar aversion, were for a long time compelled regularly to attend the theatre, when he, to tell the truth, would often have preferred to be left alone to follow his own pursuits independent of etiquette.