in a state of mystic excitement; even the striking of fifths on
the violin seemed to me like a greeting from the spirit world--
which, I may mention incidentally, had a very real meaning for
me. When I was still almost a baby, the sound of these fifths,
which has always excited me, was closely associated in my mind
with ghosts and spirits. I remember that even much later in life
I could never pass the small palace of Prince Anthony, at the end
of the Ostra Allee in Dresden, without a shudder; for it was
there I had first heard the sound of a violin, a very common
experience to me afterwards. It was close by me, and seemed to my
ears to come from the stone figures with which this palace is
adorned, some of which are provided with musical instruments.
When I took up my post as musical conductor at Dresden, and had
to pay my official visit to Morgenroth, the President of the
Concert Committee, an elderly gentleman who lived for many years
opposite that princely palace, it seemed odd to find that the
player of fifths who had so strongly impressed my musical fancy
as a boy was anything but a supernatural spectre. And when I saw
the well-known picture in which a skeleton plays on his violin to
an old man on his deathbed, the ghostly character of those very
notes impressed itself with particular force upon my childish
imagination. When at last, as a young man, I used to listen to
the Zillmann Orchestra in the Grosser Garten almost every
afternoon, one may imagine the rapturous thrill with which I drew
in all the chaotic variety of sound that I heard as the orchestra
tuned up: the long drawn A of the oboe, which seemed like a call
from the dead to rouse the other instruments, never failed to
raise all my nerves to a feverish pitch of tension, and when the
swelling C in the overture to Freischutz told me that I had
stepped, as it were with both feet, right into the magic realm of