Author : Richard Wagner
Meanwhile other and more immediate cares connected with my personal affairs became so pressing that I was obliged to devote my full attention to them. For this reason I decided to carry out a venture suggested by Giacomelli and repeat my concerts in Brussels. A contract was concluded with the Theatre de la Monnaie for three concerts, half of the receipts to be left to me, after deduction of all the costs. In the company of my agent I then traveled on March 19th to the Belgian capital to see if I could succeed there in recouping the money I had lost in Paris. Under the guidance of my mentor I found myself impelled to call on all sorts of newspaper editors and, among other Belgian notabilities, M. Fétis père. Of him I knew that he had let himself be bought by Meyerbeer against me years ago, and I now found it amusing to enter into a discussion with this autocratically posturing man, in the course of which he finally declared himself to be entirely of my opinion.
Here I also made an unusual acquaintance in Councillor of State Klindworth, whose daughter, or as some said, his wife, had previously been recommended to me by Liszt on the occasion of my stay in London; but she had never appeared, and I now had the pleasant surprise of receiving an invitation from her in Brussels. While she treated me in an extraordinarily cordial way, Herr Klindworth himself was a source of inexhaustible conversation with stories of his bizarre career as a diplomatic agent in all kinds of affairs that remained obscure to me. I dined with them on several occasions and was introduced there to Count and Countess Coudenhove, the latter being the daughter of my older friend Mme Kalergis. Herr Klindworth took a keen and continuing interest in me, which even prompted him to press upon me a letter of recommendation to Prince Metternich, with whose father he claimed to have been on close terms. He had a curious habit of interlarding his otherwise frivolous maxims with continual references to an omnipotent providence governing all things, and when, during one of our last conversations, I once hazarded an irritated retort, he utterly lost his temper, and I thought he was on the point of breaking with me completely, something which nonetheless seemed destined not to happen, then or later. Apart from these interesting acquaintances, I gained nothing in Brussels but trouble and useless effort. The first concert, non-subscription, was very well attended. But according to a clause in the contract, which I had misconstrued, all the costs of the actual performance fell upon me alone, and the concert managers now interpreted this so rigidly that there were virtually no profits left for me; this was supposed to be remedied at the second concert, but that was a subscription performance; beyond the subscribers, who, I was told, practically filled the house, there were few paying customers, so that there was not even enough left to pay my travel and living expenses, increased as they were by the presence of an agent and a servant. I therefore decided to renounce a third concert and, having been presented with a Bohemian glass vase by Mrs Street, the aforementioned daughter of Klindworth, set off back to Paris in a less than cheerful frame of mind.
Nevertheless, my stay had involved a pleasant diversion in the form of a very brief trip to Antwerp. By no means inclined to devote the little time available to me to look at art treasures, I contented myself with a tour of its external sights, which seemed to offer less of antiquarian interest than I had expected. I was especially disconcerted at the placement of the famous citadel. In conceiving the scene for the first act of my Lohengrin, I had assumed that this citadel, which I envisioned as the old castle of Antwerp, would necessarily be a prominent sight when beheld from beyond the Scheldt; instead, nothing could be seen except a flat and unremarkable plain, with fortifications dug into the ground. After this, whenever I saw Lohengrin I usually had to smile at the scene-painter’s castle, perched high in the background on top of a stately hill.