What Pohlenz had not done by his conducting of the Ninth Symphony, what the Vienna Conservatoire, Dionys Weber, and many other clumsy performances (which had led me to regard classical music as absolutely colourless) had not fully accomplished, was achieved by the inconceivable charm of the most unclassical Italian music, thanks to the wonderful, thrilling, and entrancing impersonation of Romeo by Schroder-Devrient. What effect such powerful, and as regards their causes, incomprehensible, effects had upon my opinion was shown in the frivolous way in which I was able to contrive a short criticism of Weber's Euryanthe for the Elegante Zeitung. This opera had been performed by the Leipzig company shortly before the appearance of Schroder-Devrient: cold and colourless performers, among whom the singer in the title- role, appearing in the wilderness with the full sleeves which were then the pink of fashion, is still a disagreeable memory. Very laboriously, and without verve, but simply with the object of satisfying the demands of classical rules, this company did its utmost to dispel even the enthusiastic impressions of Weber's music which I had formed in my youth. I did not know what answer to make to a brother critic of Laube's, when he pointed out to me the laboured character of this operatic performance, as soon as he was able to contrast it with the entrancing effect of that Romeo evening. Here I found myself confronted with a problem, the solving of which I was just at that time disposed to take as easily as possible, and displayed my courage by discarding all prejudice, and that daringly, in the short criticism just mentioned in which I simply scoffed at Euryanthe. Just as I had had my season of wild oat sowing as a student, so now I boldly rushed into the same courses in the development of my artistic taste.
It was May, and beautiful spring weather, and a pleasure trip that I now undertook with a friend into the promised land of my youthful romance, Bohemia, was destined to bring the unrestrained 'Young-European' mood in me to full maturity. This friend was Theodor Apel. I had known him a long while, and had always felt particularly flattered by the fact that I had won his hearty affection; for, as the son of the gifted master of metre and imitator of Greek forms of poetry, August Apel, I felt that admiring deference for him which I had never yet been able to bestow upon the descendant of a famous man. Being well-to-do and of a good family, his friendship gave me such opportunities of coming into touch with the easy circumstances of the upper classes as were not of frequent occurrence in my station of life. While my mother, for instance, regarded my association with this highly respectable family with great satisfaction, I for my part was extremely gratified at the thought of the cordiality with which I was received in such circles.
Apel's earnest wish was to become a poet, and I took it for granted that he had all that was needed for such a calling; above all, what seemed to me so important, the complete freedom that his considerable fortune assured him by liberating him from all need of earning his living or of adopting a profession for a livelihood. Strange to say, his mother, who on the death of his distinguished father had married a Leipzig lawyer, was very anxious about the vocation he should choose, and wished her son to make a fine career in the law, as she was not at all disposed to favour his poetical gifts. And it was to her attempts to convert me to her view, in order that by my influence I might avert the calamity of a second poet in the family, in the person of the son, that I owed the specially friendly relations that obtained between herself and me. All her suggestions succeeded in doing, however, was to stimulate me, even more than my own favourable opinion of his talent could, to confirm my friend in his desire to be a poet, and thus to support him in his rebellious attitude towards his family.
He was not displeased at this. As he was also studying music and composed quite nicely, I succeeded in being on terms of the greatest intimacy with him. The fact that he had spent the very year in which I had sunk into the lowest depths of undergraduate madness, studying at Heidelberg and not at Leipzig, had kept him unsullied by any share in my strange excesses, and when we now met again at Leipzig, in the spring of 1834, the only thing that we still had in common was the aesthetic aspiration of our lives, which we now strove by way of experiment to divert into the direction of the enjoyment of life. Gladly would we have flung ourselves into lively adventures if only the conditions of our environment and of the whole middle-class world in which we lived had in any way admitted of such things. Despite all the promptings of our instincts, however, we got no further than planning this excursion to Bohemia. At all events, it was something that we made the journey not by the post, but in our own carriage, and our genuine pleasure continued to lie in the fact that at Teplitz, for instance, we daily took long drives in a fine carriage. When in the evening we had supped off trout at the Wilhelmsburg, drunk good Czernosek wine with Bilin water, and duly excited ourselves over Hoffmann, Beethoven, Shakespeare, Heinse's Ardinghello, and other matters, and then, with our limbs comfortably outstretched in our elegant carriage, drove back in the summer twilight to the 'King of Prussia,' where we occupied the large balcony-room on the first floor, we felt that we had spent the day like young gods, and for sheer exuberance could think of nothing better to do than to indulge in the most frightful quarrels which, especially when the windows were open, would collect numbers of alarmed listeners in the square before the inn.
One fine morning I stole away from my friend in order to take my breakfast alone at the 'Schlackenburg,' and also to seize an opportunity of jotting down the plan of a new operatic composition in my note-book. With this end in view, I had mastered the subject of Shakespeare's Measure for Measure, which, in accordance with my present mood, I soon transformed pretty freely into a libretto entitled Liebesverbot. Young Europe and Ardinghello, and the strange frame of mind into which I had fallen with regard to classical operatic music, furnished me with the keynote of my conception, which was directed more particularly against puritanical hypocrisy, and which thus tended boldly to exalt 'unrestrained sensuality.' I took care to understand the grave Shakespearean theme only in this sense. I could see only the gloomy strait-laced viceroy, his heart aflame with the most passionate love for the beautiful novice, who, while she beseeches him to pardon her brother condemned to death for illicit love, at the same time kindles the most dangerous fire in the stubborn Puritan's breast by infecting him with the lovely warmth of her human emotion.
The fact that these powerful features are so richly developed in Shakespeare's creation only in order that, in the end, they may be weighed all the more gravely in the scales of justice, was no concern of mine: all I cared about was to expose the sinfulness of hypocrisy and the unnaturalness of such cruel moral censure. Thus I completely dropped Measure for Measure, and made the hypocrite be brought to justice only by the avenging power of love. I transferred the theme from the fabulous city of Vienna to the capital of sunny Sicily, in which a German viceroy, indignant at the inconceivably loose morals of the people, attempts to introduce a puritanical reform, and comes miserably to grief over it. Die Stumme von Portici probably contributed to some extent to this theme, as did also certain memories of Die Sizilianische Vesper. When I remember that at last even the gentle Sicilian Bellini constituted a factor in this composition, I cannot, to be sure, help smiling at the strange medley in which the most extraordinary misunderstandings here took shape.