came to us radiant with joy at the success of La Reine de Chypre,
and promised me eternal bliss for the piano score and various
other arrangements I had made of this newest rage in the sphere
of opera. So I was again forced to pay the penalty for composing
my own Fliegender Hollander by having to sit down and write out
arrangements of Halevy's opera. Yet this task no longer weighed
on me so heavily. Apart from the wellfounded hope of being at
last recalled from my exile in Paris, and thus being able, as I
thought, to regard this last struggle with poverty as the
decisive one, the arrangement of Halevy's score was far and away
a more interesting piece of hack-work than the shameful labour I
had spent on Donizetti's Favorita.

I paid another visit, the last for a long time to come, to the
Grand Opera to hear this Reine de Chypre. There was, indeed, much
for me to smile at. My eyes were no longer shut to the extreme
weakness of this class of work, and the caricature of it that was
often produced by the method of rendering it. I was sincerely
rejoiced to see the better side of Halevy again. I had taken a
great fancy to him from the time of his La Juive, and had a very
high opinion of his masterly talent.

At the request of Schlesinger I also willingly consented to write
for his paper a long article on Halevy's latest work. In it I
laid particular stress on my hope that the French school might
not again allow the benefits obtained by studying the German
style to be lost by relapsing into the shallowest Italian
methods. On that occasion I ventured, by way of encouraging the
French school, to point to the peculiar significance of Auber,
and particularly to his Stumme von Portici, drawing attention, on