I regarded this turn of events with no little satisfaction, believing that in the study of this particular work I should find a wholesome and effective diversion from all the excitement and confusion of recent events.  My horror, therefore, was all the greater, when young Wilhelm Heine one day came to my room with the news that the scenery for Lohengrin had been suddenly countermanded, and instructions given him to prepare for another opera.  I did not make any remark, nor ask the reason for this singular behaviour.  The assurances which Luttichan afterwards made to my wife—­if they were really true—­made me regret having laid the chief blame for this mortification at his door, and having thereby irrevocably alienated my sympathy from him.  When she asked him about this many years later, he assured her that he had found the court vehemently hostile to me, and that his well-meant attempts to produce my work had met with insuperable obstacles.

However that may have been, the bitterness I now experienced wrought a decisive effect upon my feelings.  Not only did I relinquish all hope of a reconciliation with the theatre authorities by a splendid production of my Lohengrin, but I determined to turn my back for ever on the theatre, and to make no further attempt to meddle with its concerns.  By this act I expressed not merely my utter indifference as to whether I kept my position as musical conductor or no, but my artistic ambitions also entirely cut me off from all possibility of ever cultivating modern theatrical conditions again.

I at once proceeded to execute my long-cherished plans for Siegfried’s Tod, which I had been half afraid of before.  In this work I no longer gave a thought to the Dresden or any other court theatre in the world; my sole preoccupation was to produce something that should free me, once and for all, from this irrational subservience.  As I could get nothing more from Rockel in this connection, I now corresponded exclusively with Eduard Devrient on matters connected with the theatre and dramatic art.  When, on the completion of my poem, I read it to him, he listened with amazement, and at once realised the fact that such a production would be an absolute drug in the modern theatrical market, and he naturally could not agree to let it remain so.  On the other hand, he tried so far to reconcile himself to my work as to try and make it less startling and more adapted for actual production.  He proved the sincerity of his intentions by pointing out my error in asking too much of the public, and requiring it to supply from its own knowledge many things necessary for a right under-standing of my subject-matter, at which I had only hinted in brief and scattered suggestions.  He showed me, for instance, that before Siegfried and Brunhilda are displayed in a position of bitter hostility towards each other, they ought first to have been presented in their true and calmer relationship.  I had, in fact, opened the poem of Siegfried’s Tod with those