remember a production of King Lear, which I followed with the
greatest interest, not only at the actual performances, but at
all the rehearsals as well. Yet these educative impressions
tended to make me feel ever more and more dissatisfied with my
work at the theatre. On the one hand, the members of the company
became gradually more distasteful to me, and on the other I was
growing discontented with the management. With regard to the
staff of the theatre, I very soon found out the hollowness,
vanity, and the impudent selfishness of this uncultured and
undisciplined class of people, for I had now lost my former
liking for the Bohemian life that had such an attraction for me
at Magdeburg. Before long there were but a few members of our
company with whom I had not quarrelled, thanks to one or the
other of these drawbacks. But my saddest experience was, that in
such disputes, into which in fact I was led simply by my zeal for
the artistic success of the performances as a whole, not only did
I receive no support from Holtei, the director, but I actually
made him my enemy. He even declared publicly that our theatre had
become far too respectable for his taste, and tried to convince
me that good theatrical performances could not be given by a
strait-laced company.

In his opinion the idea of the dignity of theatrical art was
pedantic nonsense, and he thought light serio-comic vaudeville
the only class of performance worth considering. Serious opera,
rich musical ensemble, was his particular aversion, and my
demands for this irritated him so that he met them only with
scorn and indignant refusals. Of the strange connection between
this artistic bias and his taste in the domain of morality I was
also to become aware, to my horror, in due course. For the