A concert at which most of the executants helped for love and not for money naturally came off poorly in rehearsals; still, at the final rehearsal the overtures went fairly well, the _Francs-Juges_ calling forth warm applause from the orchestra; the finale of the cantata being even more successful. In this, after the _Bacchanal_, I made the wind carry on the motif of Orpheus’ love-song to a strange rushing undertone accompaniment by the rest of the players, while the dying wail of a far-off voice cries: “Eurydice! Eurydice! hapless Eurydice!” The wild sadness of my music-picture affected the whole orchestra, and they hailed it with wild enthusiasm. I am sorry now that I burnt it, it was worth keeping for those last pages alone. With the exception of the _Bacchanal_--the famous piece in which the Conservatoire pianist got hung up--which was given with magnificent verve, nothing else in the cantata went very well and, thanks to Dupont’s illness, it was withdrawn. No doubt Cherubini preferred to say that it was because the orchestra could not play it. In this cantata I first noticed how impossible conductors, unused to grand opera, find it to give way to the capricious and varied time of the recitative. Bloc, only accustomed to songs interspersed with spoken dialogue, was quite confused and, in some places, never got right at all, which made a learned periwigged amateur, who was at rehearsal, say, as he shook his head at me: “Give me good old Italian cantatas! Now that’s the music that never bothers a conductor. It plays itself, it runs alone.” “Yes,” I said dryly, “just as old donkeys plod round and round their treadmill.” That is how I set about making friends. Much against the grain I replaced _Orpheus_ by the _Resurrexit_ from my mass, and finally the concert came off. Duprez, with his sweet, weak voice, did well in the aria; the overtures and _Resurrexit_ were also a success, but the trio with chorus was a regular failure. Not only was the trio miserably sung, but the chorus missed its entry and never came in at all! I need hardly say that, after paying expenses, including the chorus that held its tongue in such a masterly manner, I was completely cleaned out. However, the concert was a most useful lesson to me. Not only did I become known to artists and public, which (_pace_ Cherubini!) was a necessity, but, by doggedly facing the innumerable difficulties of a composer, I gained most valuable experience. Several of the papers praised me, and even Fétis--Fétis, who afterwards[4] ... spoke of me, in a drawing-room, as a coming man. But what of Miss Smithson? Alas! I found out that, absorbed in her own engrossing work, of me and my concert she never heard a whisper! _To_ HUMBERT FERRAND.