After finishing his meal Beethoven approached Rochlitz and beckoned him into a little anteroom, where conversation was carried on with the help of a tablet which Beethoven produced. He began with praise of Leipsic and its music, especially the performances in church, concert-room and theatre; outside of these things he knows nothing of Leipsic, through which he passed as a youth on his way to Vienna. (No doubt it was the Berlin trip to which Beethoven referred, of which Rochlitz appears to be ignorant.) Praise of Leipsic was followed by violent condemnation of Vienna and its music. Of my works you hear nothing. Now--in summer. No; it’s the same in winter. What is there for them to hear? “Fidelio”? they can’t perform it and do not want to hear it. The symphonies? For these they have no time. The concertos? Everybody grinds out his own productions. The solos? They’re out of fashion long ago--and fashion is everything. At the best, Schuppanzigh occasionally digs up a quartet, etc. Rochlitz is here probably helping out his memory by drawing a bit on his fancy; Schuppanzigh was at this time still in Russia, having started on a tour through Germany, Poland and Russia in 1815, from which he did not return till 1823. Rochlitz is interesting, but it is well to revise his utterances by occasional appeals to known facts. He goes on: Beethoven asked him if he lived in Weimar and Rochlitz shook his head. “Then you do not know the great Goethe?” Rochlitz nodded violently in affirmation that he did know the great Goethe. “I do, too; I got acquainted with him in Carlsbad--God knows how long ago!” (But it was not in Carlsbad that Beethoven met Goethe; it was in Teplitz and ten years “ago.”) Beethoven continued: “I was not so deaf then as I am now, but hard of hearing. How patient the great man was with me!... How happy he made me then! I would have gone to my death for him; yes, ten times! It was while I was in the ardor of this enthusiasm that I thought out my music to his ‘Egmont’--and it is a success, isn’t it?” A success, surely; but Beethoven is not likely to have forgotten that the music to “Egmont” was two years old when he met Goethe. Rochlitz, it is to be feared, is indulging his imagination again; but he is probably correct on the whole. Let Beethoven proceed with his monologue: