There were, then, a thousand reasons why Christophe's confidences should not be kindly received by anybody. But there were a thousand and one reasons why they should not be acceptable to Siegmund Ochs. The first _Kapellmeister_, Tobias Pfeiffer, was on the point of retiring: and, in spite of his youth, Christophe had every chance of succeeding him. Ochs was too good a German not to recognize that Christophe was worthy of the position, since the Court was on his side. But he had too good an opinion of himself not to believe that he would have been more worthy had the Court known him better. And so he received Christophe's effusions with a strange smile when, he arrived at the theater in the morning with a face that he tried hard to make serious, though it beamed in spite of himself. "Well?" he would say slyly as he came up to him, "another masterpiece?" Christophe would take his arm. "Ah! my friend. It is the best of all ... If you could hear it!... Devil take me, it is too beautiful! There has never been anything like it. God help the poor audience! They will only long for one thing when they have heard it: to die." His words did not fall upon deaf ears. Instead of smiling, or of chaffing Christophe about his childish enthusiasm--he would have been the first to laugh at it and beg pardon if he had been made to feel the absurdity of it--Ochs went into ironic ecstasies: he drew Christophe on to further enormities: and when he left him made haste to repeat them all, making them even more grotesque. The little circle of musicians chuckled over them: and every one was impatient for the opportunity of judging the unhappy compositions.--They were all judged beforehand. At last they appeared--Christophe had chosen from the better of his works an overture to the _Judith_ of Hebbel, the savage energy of which had attracted him, in his reaction against German atony, although he was beginning to lose his taste for it, knowing intuitively the unnaturalness of such assumption of genius, always and at all costs. He had added a symphony which bore the bombastic title of the Basle Boecklin, "_The Dream of Life_," and the motto: "_Vita somnium breve_." A song-cycle completed the programme, with a few classical works, and a _Festmarsch_ by Ochs, which Christophe had kindly offered to include in his concert, though he knew it to be mediocre.