'... Continuing his corrections, Brahms did not confine himself to remarks on the composition itself, but considered the handwriting also worthy of his notice. He pointed out that I had not placed crotchet under crotchet, and that this impaired the legibility of the manuscript; he advised me to be particular to slur the groups of notes with exactness.... "Look here," he said, fetching from the next room Wagner's autograph score of "Tannhäuser," which he opened at the long B major movement of the second act; "Wagner has taken pains to place each of the five sharps exactly in its place on _every_ line of _every_ page, and in spite of all this precision the writing is easy and flowing. If _such_ a man can write so neatly, you must do so too." He turned over the entire movement and pointed reproachfully to almost every sharp. I felt continually smaller, especially as Brahms talked himself into a kind of didactic wrathfulness. I was struck completely dumb, however, when, on my remarking that Wagner must be held chiefly responsible for the confusion prevailing in the heads of us young people, Brahms cried as though he had been stung, "_Nonsense_; the _misunderstood_ Wagner has done it. Those understand _nothing_ of the real Wagner who are led astray by him. Wagner's is one of the clearest heads that ever existed in the world!"' That Brahms was aware that the resolution to compose an opera would place him in a net of difficulties that might practically be summed up in the one word 'Wagner' is no mere conjecture. Fräulein Anna Ettlinger, an intimate friend of Levi and Allgeyer, who knew Brahms well both at Carlsruhe and Munich, relates in an article on Levi, that Brahms answered a question put to him in Munich in the course of the seventies, as to why he had written no opera by saying, 'Beside Wagner it is impossible.' It may fairly be concluded that Brahms, in the late seventies, merely 'coquetted,' as Widmann expresses it, with the idea of composing for the stage, though no doubt with considerable regret.[57] It cannot be said that the subjects he proposed to Widmann appear happy, but his suggestions must not be taken too seriously.