Although the Konneritz couple remained friendly during the whole of my prolonged sojourn in Dresden, yet the connection had not the least influence either upon my development or my position.  Only once, on the occasion of a quarrel between Luttichau and myself, the former observed that Frau von Konneritz, by her unmeasured praises, had turned my head and made me forget my position towards him.  But in making this taunt he forgot that, if any woman in the higher ranks of Dresden society had exerted a real and invigorating influence upon my inward pride, that woman was his own wife, Ida von Luttichau (nee von Knobelsdorf).

The power which this cultured, gentle, and distinguished lady exercised over my life was of a kind I now experienced for the first time, and might have become of great importance had I been favoured with more frequent and intimate intercourse.  But it was less her position as wife of the general director than her constant ill-health and my own peculiar unwillingness to appear obtrusive, that hindered our meeting, except at rare intervals.  My recollections of her merge somewhat, in my memory, with those of my own sister Rosalie.  I remember the tender ambition which inspired me to win the encouraging sympathy of this sensitive woman, who was painfully wasting away amid the coarsest surroundings.  My earliest hope for the fulfilment of this ambition arose from her appreciation of my Fliegender Hollander, in spite of the fact that, following close upon Rienzi, it had so puzzled the Dresden public.  In this way she was the first, so to speak, who swam against the tide and met me upon my new path.  So deeply was I touched by this conquest that, when I afterwards published the opera, I dedicated it to her.  In the account of my later years in Dresden I shall have more to record of the warm sympathy for my new development and dearest artistic aims for which I was indebted to her.  But of real intercourse we had none, and the character of my Dresden life was not affected by this acquaintance, otherwise so important in itself.

On the other hand, my theatrical acquaintances thrust themselves with irresistible importunancy into the wide foreground of my life, and in fact, after my brilliant successes, I was still restricted to the same limited and familiar sphere in which I had prepared myself for these triumphs.  Indeed, the only one who joined my old friends Heine and Gaffer Fischer was Tichatschek, with his strange domestic circle.  Any one who lived in Dresden at that time and chanced to know the court lithographer, Furstenau, will be astonished to hear that, without really being aware of it myself, I entered into a familiarity that was to prove a lasting one with this man who was an intimate friend of Tichatschek’s.  The importance of this singular connection may be judged from the fact that my complete withdrawal from him coincided exactly with the collapse of my civic position in Dresden.