The “Huldigung” at Berlin.—1840

I made another effort in the year 1840 to gratify one of my strongest musical wishes, with the earnest hope, too, of changing my first year's opinion of the Berlin opera, and of bringing my voice into concord with theirs who had described that theatre as affording the choicest music, executed in the most magnificent perfection. I was at Leipsic on a drizzling, dreary Thursday afternoon, in October 1840, the very weather to make an invalid—many days' distant from his own books and music, and stared at by the cold, glazed, sombre stove instead of being smiled on by his fire (that only companion with whom one is never at odds)— anticipate an evening of choice chamber-music, and the carte blanche “to do just as he liked” with particular gusto . “How unfortunate you are!” said Mendelssohn, who came in to pay me a friendly visit. “They have changed the opera at Berlin to-morrow night, and are going to give Gluck's ‘Iphigenia in Tauris.’ The letter has only just come. Eckert has taken a stall for you: you could have got there in time. What a pity you cannot go!” This was in the week of the “Huldigung,” when the nobles of Prussia had prepared for the new king in their metropolis those shows which the limited boundaries of Königsberg, where the monarch was crowned, rendered impossible.