With this she turned away. Let any playwright reproduce that scene in a
farcical or comedy form, and I am sure that three-fourths of his
audience would scout it as too exaggerated, and yet every incident of it
is absolutely true.

Among my most pleasant recollections of those days is that connected
with Von Flotow, the future composer of "Martha." In appearance he was
altogether unlike the traditional musician; he looked more like a
stalwart officer of dragoons. Though of noble origin, and with a very
wealthy father, there was a time when he had a hard struggle for
existence. Count von Flotow, his father, and an old officer of Blucher,
was nearly as much opposed to his son becoming a musician as Frederick
the Great's. Nevertheless, at the instance of Flotow's mother, he was
sent to Paris at the age of sixteen, and entered the Conservatoire, then
under the direction of Reicha. His term of apprenticeship was not to
extend beyond two years, "for," said the count, "it does not take longer
for the rawest recruit to become a good soldier." "That will give you a
fair idea," remarked Von Flotow to me afterwards, "how much he
understood about it. He had an ill-disguised contempt for any music
which did not come up to his ideal. His ideal was that performed by the
drum, the fife, and the bugle. And the very fact of Germany ringing a
few years later with the names of Meyerbeer and Halevy made matters
worse instead of mending them. His feudal pride would not allow of his
son's entering a profession the foremost ranks of which were occupied by
Jews. 'Music,' he said, 'was good enough for bankers' sons and the
like,' and he considered that Weber had cast a slur upon his family by
adopting it."

The two years grudgingly allowed by Count von Flotow for his son's
musical education were interrupted by the revolution of 1830, and the
young fellow had to return home before he was eighteen, because, in his
father's opinion, "he had not given a sign of becoming a great
musician;" in other words, he had not written an opera or anything else
which had attracted public notice. However, towards the beginning of
1831, the count took his son to Paris once more; "and though Meyerbeer
nor Halevy were not so famous then as they were destined to become
within the next three years, their names were already sufficiently well
known to have made an introduction valuable. It would not have been
difficult to obtain such." My father would not hear of it. '