Note 4 — INTRODUCTION

In 1835 he was travelling about in search of singers for the Magdeburg Opera. A temporary financial stringency—neither the first nor the last in his life!—forced him to remain a week at Frankfort. "To kill time," he says, "I had recourse, among other things, to a large red pocket-book which I carried about with me in my valise; I wrote down in this, with exact details of dates, some notes for my future biography." (He was twenty-two at the time, and almost unknown outside his own little provincial circle.) "It is the same book that is before me at this moment to refresh my memory, and which I have kept up without any breaks at various periods of my life." Mein Leben, p. 133.