Ah! the joy of no more newspaper articles!—or at least hardly any. Paganini had given me money to make music, and I made it. For seven months, with only a few days’ intermission, did I work at my symphony.
And, during those months, what a burning, exhilarating life I led! Ah! the joy of floating on the halcyon sea of poetry; wafted onward by the sweet soft breeze of imagination; warmed by the rays of that golden sun of love unveiled by Shakespeare! I felt within me the god-like strength to win my way to that blessed hidden isle, where the temple of pure art raises its soaring columns to the sky.
To others must I leave it to say whether I ever truly looked upon its glories.
Such as it was, my symphony was performed three times running, and each time appeared to be a great success. To my sorrow, Paganini never heard it nor read it. I hoped to see him again in Paris; then to send him the printed score; but he died at Nice leaving to me the poignant sorrow that he would never judge whether the work, undertaken to please him and to justify his faith in its author, was worthy of his great trust.
He, too, seemed sorry not to have known it, and in his letter of the 7th January 1840, he wrote:
“Now it is well done; jealousy can but be silent.”
Dear, noble friend! He never saw the ribald nonsense written about my work; how one called my Queen Mab music a badly-oiled squirt, how another—speaking of the Love-Scene, which musicians place in the forefront of my work—said I did not understand Shakespeare!
Empty-headed toad, bursting with stupid self-importance! If you could prove that....
Never was I more deeply hurt by criticism, and yet none of these high priests of art deigned to point out the faults, which I thankfully corrected, when told of them.
For instance, Ernst’s secretary, M. Frankoski, wrote from Vienna saying that the end of Queen Mab was too abrupt; I therefore wrote the present coda and destroyed the original one.