Early in the New Year the first of these orchestral concerts took place, and brought me much popularity on account of its unusual programme.  I had discovered that if any real significance were to be given to these concerts, in distinction to those consisting of heterogeneous scraps of music of every different species under the sun, and which are so opposed to all serious artistic taste, we could only afford to give two kinds of genuine music alternately if a good effect was to be produced.  Accordingly between two symphonies I placed one or two longer vocal pieces, which were not to be heard elsewhere, and these were the only items in the whole concert.  After the Mozart Symphony in D major, I made all the musicians move from their places to make room for an imposing choir, which had to sing Palestrina’s Stabat Mater, from an adaptation of the original recitative, which I had carefully revised, and Bach’s Motet for eight voices:  Singet dem Herrn ein neues Lied (’Sing unto the Lord a new song’); thereupon I let the orchestra again take its place to play Beethoven’s Sinfonia Eroica, and with that to end the concert.

This success was very encouraging, and disclosed to me a somewhat consoling prospect of increasing my influence as musical conductor at a time when my disgust was daily growing stronger at the constant meddling with our opera repertoire, which made me lose more and more influence as compared with the wishes of my would-be prima donna niece, whom even Tichatschek supported.  Immediately on my return from Berlin I had begun the orchestration of Lohengrin, and in all other respects had given myself up to greater resignation, which made me feel I could face my fate calmly, when I suddenly received a very disturbing piece of news.

In the beginning of February my mother’s death was announced to me.  I at once hastened to her funeral at Leipzig, and was filled with deep emotion and joy at the wonderfully calm and sweet expression of her face.  She had passed the latter years of her life, which had before been so active and restless, in cheerful ease, and at the end in peaceful and almost childlike happiness.  On her deathbed she exclaimed in humble modesty, and with a bright smile on her face:  ’Oh! how beautiful! how lovely! how divine!  Why do I deserve such favour?’ It was a bitterly cold morning when we lowered the coffin into the grave in the churchyard, and the hard, frozen lumps of earth which we scattered on the lid, instead of the customary handful of dust, frightened me by the loud noise they made.  On the way home to the house of my brother-in-law, Hermann Brockhaus, where the whole family were to gather together for an hour, Laube, of whom my mother had been very fond, was my only companion.  He expressed his anxiety at my unusually exhausted appearance, and when he afterwards accompanied me to the station, we discussed the unbearable burden which seemed to us to lie like a dead weight on every noble effort made to resist the tendency