I enjoyed conducting the Overture so much that at the first forte I broke my baton into several pieces. Glazunov, sitting in the front row, saw that there was no spare on the conductor's desk, and sent off an attendant to find me another; he brought me no fewer than three.

All went well until we got to the chorus, but they did not look at me at all, I could hardly hear them and we diverged by a semitone, so they were hurriedly shooed off the stage before the end of their number. During the interval Gabel put the blame on me and I put the blame on the chorus. Altogether it was a most upsetting thing to have happened, and Tcherepnin came round especially to console and pacify me.