Maretzek secured the score during the winter of '62-'63 and then spoke to me about the music. I worked at the part off and on for nine months, even while I was singing other parts and taking my summer vacation. But when the season opened in the autumn of 1863, the performance was postponed because a certain reaction had set in on the part of the public. People were beginning to want some sort of distraction and relaxation from the horrors and anxieties of war, and now began to come again to hear the old favourites. So Maretzek wanted to wait and put off his new sensation until he really needed it as a drawing card. Then came the news that Anschutz, the German manager, was about to bring a German company to the Terrace Garden in New York with a fine _répertoire_ of grand opera, including _Faust_. Of course this settled the question. Maretzek hurried the new opera into final rehearsal and it was produced at The Academy of Music on November 25, 1863, when I was very little more than twenty years old. Before I myself say anything about _Faust_, in which I was soon to appear, I want to quote the views of a leading newspaper of New York after I had appeared. A brilliant audience assembled last night. The opera was _Faust_. Such an audience ought, in figurative language, "to raise the roof off" with applause. But with the clumsily written, uninspired melodies that the solo singers have to declaim there was the least possible applause. And this is not the fault of the vocalists, for they tried their best. We except to this charge of dullness the dramatic love scene where the tolerably broad business concludes the act. With these facts plain to everyone present we cannot comprehend the announcement of the success of _Faust_! Who was it said "the world goes round with revolutions"? It is a great truth, whoever said it. Every new step in art, in progress along any line, has cost something and has been fought for. Nothing fresh or good has ever come into existence without a convulsion of the old, dried-up forms. Beethoven was a revolutionist when he threw aside established musical forms with the _Ninth Symphony_; Wagner was a revolutionist when he contrived impossible intervals of the eleventh and the thirteenth, and called them for the first time dissonant harmonies; so, also, was Gounod when he departed from all accepted operatic forms and institutions in _Faust_.