Grillparzer still hopes that the breath of musical life will be breathed into “Melusine”; Duport, having secured the Court Opera, asks for it, and Brother Johann and Karl urge that an opera is the most remunerative enterprise to which he can now apply himself. Schlesinger, in Berlin, had told Count von Brühl that Beethoven was disposed to write an opera for the Royal Opera at the Prussian capital and Brühl had written to the composer that he would be glad to have an opera from him and expressed a desire that he collaborate with Grillparzer in its making; but he did not want “Melusine,” because of the resemblance between its subject and that of de la Motte-Fouqué’s “Undine.” An adaptation to operatic uses of Goethe’s “Claudine von Villa Bella” was discussed, apparently with favor, but Kanne, who was designated to take the adaptation in hand, was afraid to meddle with the great poet’s drama. So nothing came of the Berlin project or of “Melusine,” though Grillparzer talked it over again with Beethoven and told Holz that though he was not inclined to attach too great importance to it, he yet thought it would be hard to find an opera text better adapted to its purpose than it, from a musical and scenic point of view. To Schindler, Beethoven once held out a prospect that “something would come” of the idea of music for “Faust” which Rochlitz had implanted in Beethoven’s mind; but it shared the fate of opera and oratorio. His friends also urged him to compose a Requiem mass and such a composition belongs in the category with the oratorio as a work which he had been paid to undertake. Among the ardent admirers of Beethoven and most zealous patrons of the Schuppanzigh Quartets was Johann Nepomuk Wolfmayer, a much respected cloth merchant. One of the methods chosen by Wolfmayer to show his appreciation of the composer was occasionally to have a new coat made for him which he would bring to Beethoven’s lodgings, place upon a chair and then see to it that an old one disappeared from his wardrobe. We have already heard a similar story from Mayseder. It is said that Wolfmayer sometimes had difficulty in getting the composer’s consent to the exchange, but always managed to do it. Early in the second decade of the century Wolfmayer commissioned Beethoven to write a _Requiem_ for him and paid him 1,000 florins as an advance on the honorarium. Beethoven promised, but never set to work: though Holz says that he was firmly resolved to do so and, in talking about it, said that he was better satisfied with Cherubini’s setting of the text of the Mass for the Dead than with Mozart’s. A _Requiem_, he said, should be a sorrowful memorial of the dead and have nothing in it of the noises of the last trump and the day of judgment.