My stay at Prague was to be of great musical importance to me.  I knew the director of the Conservatoire, Dionys Weber, who promised to bring my symphony before the public; I also spent much of my time with an actor called Moritz, to whom, as an old friend of our family, I had been recommended, and there I made the acquaintance of the young musician Kittl.

Moritz, who noticed that not a day passed but what I went to the much-feared chief of the Conservatoire upon some pressing musical business, once despatched me with an improvised parody on Schiller’s Burgschaft:—­

     Zu Dionys dem Direktor schlich
     Wagner, die Partitur im Gewande;
     Ihn schlugen die Schuler im Bande: 
     ‘Was wolltest du mit den Noten sprich?’
     Entgegnet ihm finster der Wutherich: 
     ’Die Stadt vom schlechten Geschmacke befreien! 
     Das sollst du in den Rezensionen bereuen.’

[Footnote:  To Dionys, the Director, crept Wagner, the score in his pocket; The students arrested him forthwith:  ‘What do’st thou with that music, say?’ Thus asked him the angry tyrant:  ’To free the town from taste too vile!  For this the critics will make thee suffer.’ ]

Truly I had to deal with a kind of ‘Dionysius the Tyrant.’  A man who did not acknowledge Beethoven’s genius beyond his Second Symphony, a man who looked upon the Eroica as the acme of bad taste on the master’s part; who praised Mozart alone, and next to him tolerated only Lindpaintner:  such a man was not easy to approach, and I had to learn the art of making use of tyrants for one’s own purposes.  I dissimulated; I pretended to be struck by the novelty of his ideas, never contradicted him, and, to point out the similarity of our standpoints, I referred him to the end fugue in my Overture and in my Symphony (both in C major), which I had only succeeded in making what they were through having studied Mozart.  My reward soon followed:  Dionys set to work to study my orchestral creations with almost youthful energy.

The students of the Conservatoire were compelled to practise with the greatest exactitude my new symphony under his dry and terribly noisy baton.  In the presence of several of my friends, amongst whom was also the dear old Count Pachta in his capacity of President of the Conservatoire Committee, we actually held a first performance of the greatest work that I had written up to that date.

During these musical successes I went on with my love-making in the attractive house of Count Pachta, under the most curious circumstances.  A confectioner of the name of Hascha was my rival.  He was a tall, lanky young man who, like most Bohemians, had taken up music as a hobby; he played the accompaniments to Auguste’s songs, and naturally fell in love with her.  Like myself, he hated the frequent visits of the cavaliers, which seemed to be quite the custom in this city; but while my displeasure expressed itself in humour, his showed itself in gloomy melancholy.  This mood made him behave boorishly in public:  for instance, one evening, when the chandelier was to be lighted for the reception of one of these gentlemen, he ran his head purposely against this ornament and broke it.  The festive illumination was thus rendered impossible; the Countess was furious, and Hascha had to leave the house never to return.