an instrument,’ they gave way, and decided to let me have regular lessons in harmony from Muller, the very musician from whom I had had instruction on the sly some little while before, and who had not yet been paid.  In return for this I promised faithfully to go back to work conscientiously at St. Nicholas’s School.  I soon grew tired of both.  I could brook no control, and this unfortunately applied to my musical instruction as well.  The dry study of harmony disgusted me more and more, though I continued to conceive fantasias, sonatas, and overtures, and work them out by myself.  On the other hand, I was spurred on by ambition to show what I could do at school if I liked.  When the Upper School boys were set the task of writing a poem, I composed a chorus in Greek, on the recent War of Liberation.  I can well imagine that this Greek poem had about as much resemblance to a real Greek oration and poetry, as the sonatas and overtures I used to compose at that time had to thoroughly professional music.  My attempt was scornfully rejected as a piece of impudence.  After that I have no further recollections of my school.  My continued attendance was a pure sacrifice on my side, made out of consideration for my family:  I did not pay the slightest attention to what was taught in the lessons, but secretly occupied myself all the while with reading any book that happened to attract me.

As my musical instruction also did me no good, I continued in my wilful process of self-education by copying out the scores of my beloved masters, and in so doing acquired a neat handwriting, which in later years has often been admired.  I believe my copies of the C minor Symphony and the Ninth Symphony by Beethoven are still preserved as souvenirs.

Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony became the mystical goal of all my strange thoughts and desires about music.  I was first attracted to it by the opinion prevalent among musicians, not only in Leipzig but elsewhere, that this work had been written by Beethoven when he was already half mad.  It was considered the ‘non plus ultra’ of all that was fantastic and incomprehensible, and this was quite enough to rouse in me a passionate desire to study this mysterious work.  At the very first glance at the score, of which I obtained possession with such difficulty, I felt irresistibly attracted by the long-sustained pure fifths with which the first phrase opens:  these chords, which, as I related above, had played such a supernatural part in my childish impressions of music, seemed in this case to form the spiritual keynote of my own life.  This, I thought, must surely contain the secret of all secrets, and accordingly the first thing to be done was to make the score my own by a process of laborious copying.  I well remember that on one occasion the sudden appearance of the dawn made such an uncanny impression on my excited nerves that I jumped into bed with a scream as though I had seen a ghost.  The symphony at that time had not yet been arranged for the piano;