One of his colleagues in the various offices of the Court Theatres was Georg Friedrich Treitschke, born in 1776, a native of Leipsic, who came to the Court Theatre in 1800 as an actor, but whose talents and fine character raised him in the course of the next two years to the position of poet and stage-manager of the German Court Opera, a post which he still and for many years continued to hold. He was therefore now (1804) in close business relations with Baron Braun and Sonnleithner; and, until some proof be adduced of lapse of memory--for his known probity forbids all suspicion of intentional or careless misrepresentation--his statements in regard to them may be accepted with perfect confidence. Treitschke wrote thus in the “Orpheus” of 1841 (p. 258): At the end of 1804 Baron von Braun, the new owner of the Royal Imperial priv. Theater-an-der-Wien, commissioned Ludwig van Beethoven, then in the full strength of youth, to write an opera for that playhouse. Because of his oratorio, “Christus am Ölberg,” it was believed that the master might do as much for dramatic music as he had done for instrumental. Besides his honorarium[23] he was offered free lodgings in the theatre buildings. Joseph Sonnleithner undertook to provide the text, and chose the French book, “L’Amour conjugal,” although it had already been set by Gaveaux and to Italian words as “Leonora” by Paër, but had been translated from both dramatizations into German. Beethoven had no fear of his predecessors and went to work with eager delight, so that the opera was nearly finished by the middle of 1805.[24] Such is Treitschke’s simple and compendious statement of the facts; a statement which has been affirmed to contain “manifold errors,” yet, in truth, not a single point in it can be controverted. In Paris, at the close of the 18th century, Shakespeare’s “being taken by the insolent foe and redemption thence” was by far the most popular subject for the stage. Doubtless so many facts stranger than fiction in recent narratives of escape from dungeon and guillotine, rendered doubly fascinating by beautiful exhibitions of disinterested affection, exalted generosity and heroic self-sacrifice, were not without their effect upon public taste. Certain it is that no other class of subjects is so numerously represented in the French drama of that precise period as this. “Les deux Journées” by J. N. Bouilly stands confessedly at its head. In Beethoven’s opinion in 1823, this and “La Vestale” were the two best texts then ever written. Two years before the “Deux Journées”--that is, on February 19th, 1798--the same poet had produced another of that class of texts, which, if less abounding in pleasing and exciting scenes, still contained one supreme moment that cannot readily find its like. This was “Léonore, ou l’Amour conjugal”; the seventeenth and last in Fétis’ list of Pierre Gaveaux’s thirty-five operas and operettas.