In 1841 began a troublesome and harassing connection with Berlin, a city where, except in his home life, Mendelssohn never seems to have been very fortunate. At the urgent entreaty of the king, he went to reside there as head of the new Musical Academy. But disagreements arose, and he did not long take an active part in the management. The king, however, was very anxious to retain his services, and a sort of general office seems to have been created for him, the duties of which were to supply music for any dramatic works which the king took it into his head to have so embellished. And, though it is to this that we owe the noble "Antigone," "Oedipus," "Athalie," "Midsummer Night's Dream," and other music, this work to dictation was very worrying, and one cannot think without impatience of the annoyances to which he was subjected. The king could not understand why he shrank from writing music to the choruses of Æschylus's "Eumenides." Other composers would do it by the yard, why not he? Passing rapidly over the intervening years filled with busy work, both in composition and as one of the principals of a newly started Conservatorium in Leipsic, we come to 1846, when his great work "Elijah" was at last completed and performed. On August 26th, at the Birmingham Festival, the performance went splendidly. Staudigl took the part of the prophet, and a young tenor, Lockey, sang the air, "Then shall the righteous," in the last part, as Mendelssohn says, "so very beautifully, that I was obliged to collect myself to prevent my being overcome, and to enable me to beat time steadily." Rarely, indeed, has a composer so truly realized his own conception as Mendelssohn did in the great tone-picture which he drew of the Prophet of Carmel and the wilderness. "I figured to myself," he says, "Elijah as a grand, mighty prophet, such as might again reappear in our own day, energetic and zealous, stern, wrathful, and gloomy, a striking contrast to the court myrmidons and popular rabble--in fact, in opposition to the whole world, and yet borne on angel's wings!" Nothing can be finer than this, with that exquisite touch in the last words, "_in opposition to the whole world, and yet borne on angel's wings_."