had the gratification later of receiving an exceedingly warm appreciation of my rendering from Herr Eduard Devrient, a great Gluck connoisseur.  After hearing this opera as presented by us, and comparing it with the Berlin performance, he heartily praised the tenderly modulated character of our rendering of certain parts, which, he said, had been given in Berlin with the coarsest bluntness.  He mentioned, as a striking instance of this, a brief chorus in C major of male and female nymphs in the third act.  By the introduction of a more moderate tempo and very soft piano I had tried to free this from the original coarseness with which Devrient had heard it rendered in Berlin—­presumably with traditional fidelity.  My most innocent device, and one which I frequently adopted, for disguising the irritating stiffness or the orchestral movement in the original, was a careful modification of the Basso-continuo, which was taken uninterruptedly in common time.  This I felt obliged to remedy, partly by legato playing, and partly by pizzicato.

Our management were lavish in their expenditure on externals, especially decoration, and as a spectacular opera the piece drew fairly large houses, thus earning me the reputation of being a very suitable conductor for Gluck, and one who was in close sympathy with him.  This result was the more conspicuous from the fact that Iphigenia in Tauris which is a far superior work, and in which Devrient’s interpretation of the title-role was admirable had been performed to empty houses,

I had to live upon this reputation for a long time, as it often happened that I was compelled to give inferior performances of repertoire pieces, including Mozart’s operas.  The mediocrity of these was particularly disappointing to those who, after my success in Armida, had expected a great deal from my rendering of these pieces, and were much disappointed in consequence.  Even sympathetic hearers sought to explain their disappointment on the ground that I did not appreciate Mozart and could not understand him.  But they failed to realise how impossible it was for me, as a mere conductor, to exercise any real influence on such desultory performances, which were merely given as stopgaps, and often without rehearsal.  Indeed, in this matter I often found myself in a false position, which, as I was powerless to remedy it, contributed not a little to render unbearable both my new office and my dependence upon the meanest motives of a paltry theatrical routine, already overweighted with the cares of business.  This, in fact, became worse than I had expected, in spite of my previous knowledge of the precariousness of such a life.  My colleague Reissiger, to whom from time to time I poured out my woes regarding the scant attention given by the general management to our demands for the maintenance of correct representations in the realm of opera, comforted me by saying that I, like himself, would sooner or later relinquish all these fads and submit to the inevitable fate of a conductor.  Thereupon he proudly smote his stomach, and hoped that I might soon be able to boast of one as round as his own.