Yet I had attained this much:  I was no longer dependent for music on the playing of others; from this time forth I used to try and play, albeit very imperfectly, everything I wanted to know.  I also tried Mozart’s Don Juan, but was unable to get any pleasure out of it, mainly because the Italian text in the arrangement for the piano placed the music in a frivolous light in my eyes, and much in it seemed to me trivial and unmanly. (I can remember that when my sister used to sing Zerlinen’s ariette, Batti, batti, ben Masetto, the music repelled me, as it seemed so mawkish and effeminate.)

On the other hand, my bent for music grew stronger and stronger, and I now tried to possess myself of my favourite pieces by making my own copies.  I can remember the hesitation with which my mother for the first time gave me the money to buy the scored paper on which I copied out Weber’s Lutzow’s Jagd, which was the first piece of music I transcribed.

Music was still a secondary occupation with me when the news of Weber’s death and the longing to learn his music to Oberon fanned my enthusiasm into flame again.  This received fresh impetus from the afternoon concerts in the Grosser Garten at Dresden, where I often heard my favourite music played by Zillmann’s Town Band, as I thought, exceedingly well.  The mysterious joy I felt in hearing an orchestra play quite close to me still remains one of my most pleasant memories.  The mere tuning up of the instruments put me in a state of mystic excitement; even the striking of fifths on the violin seemed to me like a greeting from the spirit world—­ which, I may mention incidentally, had a very real meaning for me.  When I was still almost a baby, the sound of these fifths, which has always excited me, was closely associated in my mind with ghosts and spirits.  I remember that even much later in life I could never pass the small palace of Prince Anthony, at the end of the Ostra Allee in Dresden, without a shudder; for it was there I had first heard the sound of a violin, a very common experience to me afterwards.  It was close by me, and seemed to my ears to come from the stone figures with which this palace is adorned, some of which are provided with musical instruments.  When I took up my post as musical conductor at Dresden, and had to pay my official visit to Morgenroth, the President of the Concert Committee, an elderly gentleman who lived for many years opposite that princely palace, it seemed odd to find that the player of fifths who had so strongly impressed my musical fancy as a boy was anything but a supernatural spectre.  And when I saw the well-known picture in which a skeleton plays on his violin to an old man on his deathbed, the ghostly character of those very notes impressed itself with particular force upon my childish imagination.  When at last, as a young man, I used to listen to the Zillmann Orchestra in the Grosser Garten almost every afternoon, one may imagine the rapturous thrill