At this time I also wrote (as my third opus) an overture to Raupach’s drama, Konig Enzio, in which again Beethoven’s influence made itself even more strongly felt.  My sister Rosalie succeeded in getting it performed at the theatre before the play; for the sake of prudence they did not announce it on the programme the first time.  Dorn conducted it, and as the performance went off all right, and the public showed no dissatisfaction, my overture was played with my full name on the programme several times during the run of the above-mentioned drama.

After this I tried my hand at a big Symphony (in C major); in this work I showed what I had learnt by using the influence of my study of Beethoven and Mozart towards the achievement of a really pleasant and intelligible work, in which the fugue was again present at the end, while the themes of the various movements were so constructed that they could be played consecutively.

Nevertheless, the passionate and bold element of the Sinfonia Eroica was distinctly discernible, especially in the first movement.  The slow movement, on the contrary, contained reminiscences of my former musical mysticism.  A kind of repeated interrogative exclamation of the minor third merging into the fifth connected in my mind this work (which I had finished with the utmost effort at clearness) with my very earliest period of boyish sentimentality.

When, in the following year, I called on Friedrich Rochlitz, at that time the ‘Nestor’ of the musical aesthetes in Leipzig, and president of the Gewandhaus, I prevailed upon him to promise me a performance of my work.  As he had been given my score for perusal before seeing me, he was quite astonished to find that I was a very young man, for the character of my music had prepared him to see a much older and more experienced musician.  Before this performance took place many things happened which I must first mention, as they were of great importance to my life.

My short and stormy career as a student had drowned in me not only all longing for further development, but also all interest in intellectual and spiritual pursuits.  Although, as I have pointed out, I had never alienated myself entirely from music, my revived interest in politics aroused my first real disgust for my senseless student’s life, which soon left no deeper traces on my mind than the remembrance of a terrible nightmare.

The Polish War of Independence against Russian supremacy filled me with growing enthusiasm.  The victories which the Poles obtained for a short period during May, 1831, aroused my enthusiastic admiration:  it seemed to me as though the world had, by some miracle, been created anew.  As a contrast to this, the news of the battle of Ostrolenka made it appear as if the end of the world had come.  To my astonishment, my boon companions scoffed at me when I commented upon some of these events; the terrible lack of all fellow-feeling and comradeship amongst the students