a young lady of dubious character who he believed was deeply in
love with him. One day, without warning, I found his house closed
to me, and discovered, to my astonishment, that jealousy was the
cause. The unexpected discovery of this liaison, which was my
first experience of such a case, filled me with a strange horror.
My friend suddenly appeared to me even more mad than he really
was. I felt so ashamed of my persistent blindness that for some
time to come I never went to any of the garden concerts for fear
I should meet my sham Kreissler.

By this time I had composed my first Sonata in D minor. I had
also begun a pastoral play, and had worked it out in what I felt
sure must be an entirely unprecedented way.

I chose Goethe's Laune der Verliebten as a model for the form and
plot of my work. I scarcely even drafted out the libretto,
however, but worked it out at the same time as the music and
orchestration, so that, while I was writing out one page of the
score, I had not even thought out the words for the next page. I
remember distinctly that following this extraordinary method,
although I had not acquired the slightest knowledge about writing
for instruments, I actually worked out a fairly long passage
which finally resolved itself into a scene for three female
voices followed by the air for the tenor. My bent for writing for
the orchestra was so strong that I procured a score of Don Juan,
and set to work on what I then considered a very careful
orchestration of a fairly long air for soprano. I also wrote a
quartette in D major after I had myself sufficiently mastered the
alto for the viola, my ignorance of which had caused me great
difficulty only a short time before, when I was studying a