Not many months had passed before he, too, had followed Theodore Thomas back to New York, I met him in the lobby of the Academy of Music between the acts of the opera. It was in the consulship of Mapleson. "Hello!" I greeted him. "Back to New York so soon? What's the matter in Cincinnati?"
The quizzical smile with which he had greeted me grew wider as he replied sententiously:
"I'm not a hog. I know when I've got enough!"
Maretzek was a Hebrew, born in Brünn, Moravia, and educated in Vienna, where first he studied medicine, but, according to his own story, becoming disgusted with the sights of the dissecting room, he changed his purposes and devoted himself to music. He wrote an opera entitled "Hamlet" when he was twenty-two years old, and a year later, in 1844, found himself in London, employed under Balfe at Her Majesty's Theater. Thence he was brought to New York to conduct the opera for Mr. E. P. Fry, as has already been mentioned, in 1848. After one season as conductor he started in on his career as manager, which lasted twenty-five years, the first five of which are amusingly described in his book "Crotchets and Quavers." More than twenty years later he attempted to continue the story in a musical journal, and gathering the disconnected chapters together, issued them in an unattractive form under the title "Flats and Sharps." The first book is, to some extent, a contribution to musical history, though its strong personal equation and its effort to be entertaining mar its value and influence. The impression to which I have given utterance, that he was helped in its preparations by some penny-a-liner, is based upon the difference between its pages and the personal letters which I received from Maretzek in his later years, especially a brief autobiographical sketch which he prepared for me. To judge by the evidence of book and sketch, the latter in his own handwriting and delivered in person, one was forced to the conclusion either that he knew more about the English language six years after his first coming to New York than he did twenty years later or that he had hired somebody fluent but malignant of pen to put his thoughts into shape. It had long been the fashion for theatrical managers and opera impresarios to give the history of their administrations to the world, and Maretzek was but following it, though why he should have done so before he had finally and definitely retired from the field it is not easy to see.