I now wanted to set Leubald und Adelaide to music, similar to that which Beethoven wrote to Goethe’s Egmont; the various ghosts from the spirit world, who were each to display different characteristics, were to borrow their own distinctive colouring from appropriate musical accompaniment.  In order to acquire the necessary technique of composition quickly I studied Logier’s Methode des Generalbasses, a work which was specially recommended to me at a musical lending library as a suitable text-book from which this art might be easily mastered.  I have distinct recollections that the financial difficulties with which I was continually harassed throughout my life began at this time.  I borrowed Logier’s book on the weekly payment system, in the fond hope of having to pay for it only during a few weeks out of the savings of my weekly pocket-money.  But the weeks ran on into months, and I was still unable to compose as well as I wished.  Mr. Frederick Wieck, whose daughter afterwards married Robert Schumann, was at that time the proprietor of that lending library.  He kept sending me troublesome reminders of the debt I owed him; and when my bill had almost reached the price of Logier’s book I had to make a clean breast of the matter to my family, who thus not only learnt of my financial difficulties in general, but also of my latest transgression into the domain of music, from which, of course, at the very most, they expected nothing better than a repetition of Leubald und Adelaide.

There was great consternation at home; my mother, sister, and brother-in-law, with anxious faces, discussed how my studies should be superintended in future, to prevent my having any further opportunity for transgressing in this way.  No one, however, yet knew the real state of affairs at school, and they hoped I would soon see the error of my ways in this case as I had in my former craze for poetry.

But other domestic changes were taking place which necessitated my being for some little time alone in our house at Leipzig during the summer of 1829, when I was left entirely to my own devices.  It was during this period that my passion for music rose to an extraordinary degree.  I had secretly been taking lessons in harmony from G. Muller, afterwards organist at Altenburg, an excellent musician belonging to the Leipzig orchestra.  Although the payment of these lessons was also destined to get me into hot water at home later on, I could not even make up to my teacher for the delay in the payment of his fees by giving him the pleasure of watching me improve in my studies.  His teaching and exercises soon filled me with the greatest disgust, as to my mind it all seemed so dry.  For me music was a spirit, a noble and mystic monster, and any attempt to regulate it seemed to lower it in my eyes.  I gathered much more congenial instruction about it from Hoffmann’s Phantasiestucken than from my Leipzig orchestra player; and now came the time when I really lived and breathed