It was early in the seventies that he finally emerged from his studious reserve and appeared before the world with an opera, «The King and the Collier,» which he was commissioned to write for the National Theater. So clear was the patriotic intent of this commission, so entirely was the popular interest enlisted in Smetana's effort to build up a Bohemian school of music, that it is hard to conceive how Dvořák could have fallen into the error he now made. He prepared for his fellow-countrymen a Wagnerian music-drama. The situation is comic. The good Bohemians, come to hear folk-tunes, were given leit-motifs and «infinite melody.» If they failed to sympathize with his adoration for the Bayreuth master (and it seems indeed to have been but a calf-sickness, afterwards bravely outlived), if «The King and the Collier» was a flat failure, Dvořák had no one but himself to blame. At this point, however, as at so many others in his career, his unfailing energy saved the day so nearly lost by what one critic has called his «brainlessness.» He set to and rewrote his work entire, leaving not a single number of the unhappy music-drama. But now the libretto, which had at first been spared a disapproval all concentrated upon the music, proved worthless and flat, and the opera was damned afresh. Still Dvořák persisted. Getting a poet to set an entirely new «book» to his entirely new music, he made at last a success with an opera of which Mr. Hadow well says that «the Irishman's knife, which had a new blade and a new handle, does not offer a more bewildering problem of identity.» No one but Dvořák would have so bungled his undertaking; no one but he would so have forced it to a successful issue.