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As you ask my advice about what you had better do, accept his proposition or hold it over till "Siegfried", so as to make him publish the score of a new work for you, I have no hesitation in saying that, for all manner of reasons, I should think it preferable to publish now only the pianoforte score of "Lohengrin", and to make arrangements with Hartel that the pianoforte score and full score of "Siegfried" should appear soon after the Weymar performance, which probably, and at the latest, will take place in February, 1853, for the fete of H.R.H. the Grand Duchess.
He frequently emphasizes his desire to have his compositions printed in an attractive style, and in 1839 writes to Härtel that he cannot describe his pleasure on receiving the "Scenes of Childhood." "It is the most charming specimen of musical typography I have ever seen."
The Breitkopf and Hartel edition, which includes only one of these two mazurkas, comprises further a mazurka in G major and one in B flat major of 1825, one in D major of 1829-30, a remodelling of the same of 1832 these have already been discussed and a somewhat more interesting one in C major of 1833. E. Pauer has shown to belong to Charles Mayer.
Alicia Van Buren, also author of a number of worthy songs, has published a string quartette with Breitkopf and Härtel. Alice Locke Pitman, now Mrs. Wesley, has written several violin works, besides a number of songs. Mary Knight Wood, another gifted member of the new generation, studied with Arthur Foote and B. J. Lang.
The arrival of the promised Erard grand-piano made me painfully conscious of what a tin kettle my old grand-piano from Breitkopf und Hartel had been, and I forthwith banished it to the lower regions, where my wife begged she might keep it as a souvenir 'of old times. She afterwards took it with her to Saxony, where she sold it for three hundred marks.
The property of which she spoke consisted of a Breitkopf and Hartel grand-piano that looked better than it sounded, and of the 'title-page' of the Nibelungen by Cornelius in a Gothic frame that used to hang over my desk in Dresden. With this nucleus of household effects we now decided to take small lodgings in the so-called 'hinteren Escherhausern' in the Zeltweg.
Hartel, the publishers of the book, has taken exception to certain passages in that preface to which I did not wish to have any demonstrative intention attributed, and which I might have expressed just as well in a different way; and the appearance of the book has in consequence been much retarded, to my great annoyance, for special reasons.
As early as December of 1854 he had written to Liszt mentioning it as planned in his head; and in this letter of '58 he says, "... I saw no other way open to me but to negotiate with Härtel, and I chose for this subject Tristan, then scarcely begun, because I had nothing else. That is why this poor work was hurried on in such a business-like manner."
Once again I took up the threads of my negotiations with Hartel about the Nibelungen, but I was obliged to put them down as unfruitful, and little calculated to end in any success for this work.
I asked his widow to let me have any pamphlets of a theoretical nature he might have left behind, and I came into possession of several important ones, among them the longer essay on 'Theme-Structure. Although the publication of these works would involve a great deal of trouble, owing to the necessity of revising them, I asked Hartel of Leipzig if he would pay the widow a fair sum for a volume of Uhlig's writings.
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