“Do I recall the first performance that I conducted?” said Mr. Scheel. “Yes, and it was an opera. Meyerbeer’s ‘Robert Le Diable.’ I was exactly nineteen and a half years old, and a lost orchestra score led to it. I was the concertmaster then in the Chemnitz Orchestra, which in summer played for the opera performances in Bremerhafen at the Court Theatre. The opera of ‘Robert Le Diable’ was announced, and when the morning of the first rehearsal came it was discovered that the entire second act of the conductor’s score had been lost. Herr Pohl, the conductor, a young man of thirty-three, refused to go on with the opera. It was too late to think of getting another score in time for the rehearsals necessary for the performance. The only way out of it seemed to be the withdrawal of the opera. Some of the singers, who had noticed the cue for their phrases that I had given them on the violin, asked whether I would not conduct. ‘If the conductor invites me I will,’ I said. When this was repeated to the conductor he promptly gave the invitation, and it was a pressing one, for they wished to give the opera and keep faith with the public. That entire second act I had to conduct from the first violin part, memory supplying the rest. The performance went without a break. That settled my career. Three days later I conducted Gounod’s ‘Faust,’ and immediately afterward ‘L’Africaine,’ of Meyerbeer, Herr Pohl himself supplying the harp part on a piano. In the years that followed many were the performances that I conducted, including the entire ‘Niebelungen Ring’ of Wagner. But I never hear a fragment of Meyerbeer’s ‘Robert Le Diable’ without smiling to myself at the recollection of the time when I conducted the second act from the first violin part.”