Page:Selected letters of Mendelssohn 1894.djvu/97

Rh So on Monday the 17th, about half-past six in the evening, think of me and the thirty fiddlers and the wind instruments striking up. The C minor symphony starts the first part, the “Midsummer Night’s Dream” the second. The first closes with my new piece in G minor. Then, alas! at the close of the second I have to improvise, a thing you will believe I don’t look forward to, but these people insist on it. Bärmann has decided to play again; Breiting, the Vials, Loehle, Beyer, and Pellegrini are the singers and share the part-music. The place will be the Odeon, and the proceeds go to the Munich charities.

Every morning I have to write and correct and instrument in preparation for the great event; then comes one o’clock, and I depart for Scheidel’s coffee-house in the Kausingergasse, where I know all the faces already by heart, and find their owners every day in precisely the same positions, two playing chess, three looking on, five reading the newspapers, six dining, and myself the seventh. After dinner Bärmann generally comes and carries me off. We talk about concert business, or else go for a walk to a beer and coffee-house, then back home and to work again. For the evenings I have rigorously refused all invitations, but there are so many delightful houses where I can walk in uninvited that I am seldom in my study after eight. The place I live in is a room flush with the ground, which was formerly a shop, so that everybody who passes looks in and says good morning. Near me there lives a Greek, who is learning the piano; he is abominable, but my landlord’s daughter, who is very