Rose early, looked through the tricky passages in Figaro, and at ten o'clock was ready and waiting for the general rehearsal. I took with me Nadya and Sonya Shtember, who wanted to get an idea of me as a conductor. The opera went smoothly, except for the chorus in the first act, which made a fair old mess of it. The problem was that I had never worked with the chorus and they had not been at the previous rehearsal, so we had not got to know one another. My tempo was different to the one the choristers were used to, they did not look at me but ploughed on in their own sweet way, while because they were right at the back of the stage behind the scenery I could not hear them very well and did not follow them. In the second act Mandelbaum wrecked the whole scene in which he appears, and it had to be repeated. He is the black spot of the production. In the interval he was heard complaining in high dudgeon that I did not give him his cues, but how can I possibly do that when he invariably comes in long before he is supposed to? In the third act the sextet fell apart, but the fourth act went well.