Richard Wagner's autobiography is an enjoyable read - he has few good words to say about anyone except himself, where his immodesty is breathtaking! Typically, this is the case with Raff - whom Wagner had known since Raff was part of Liszt's circle in the 1840's and 50's. Raff wrote a famous treatise on Wagner's music, Die Wagner Frage, which wasn't wholly uncritical and no doubt this wasn't forgotten by the master when he came to put pen to paper.

The Raffs get two mentions by Wagner. The first treats Raff to a typical dose of Wagner's character assasination...

"I had already looked up the Raff family in Wiesbaden, where Frau Raff had an engagement at the court theatre. She was a sister of Emilie Genast, with whom I had been on friendly terms during my stay in Weimar. One excellent piece of information I heard about her was that by extraordinary thrift and good management she had succeeded in raising her husband's position of careless wastefulness to a flourishing and prosperous one. Raff himself, who by his own accounts of his dissipated life under Liszt's patronage, had led me to regard him as an eccentric genius, at once disabused me of this idea when, on a closer acquaintance, I found him an uncommonly uninteresting and insipid man, full of self-conceit, but without any power of taking a wide outlook on the world.

Taking advantage of the prosperous condition to which he had attained, thanks to his wife, he considered he was entitled to patronise me by giving me some friendly advice in regard to my position at the time. He thought it advisable to tell me that I ought in my dramatic compositions to pay more attention the reality of things, and to illustrate his meaning he pointed my score of Tristan as an abortion of idealistic extravagances.

In the course of my rambles on foot to Wiesbaden I sometimes liked to call on Raff's wife, a rather insignificant woman, but Raff himself was a person to whom I soon became perfectly indifferent. Still, when he came to know me a little better, he lowered the tone of his sagelike maxims, and even appeared to be rather afraid of my chaffing humour, against the shafts of which he knew he was defenseless". In the second mention, Wagner grudgingly credits Raff with persuading him to publish the Wesendonck Lieder...

"On the advice of Raff, who considered a volume of my songs to be worth one thousand franks, I decided to offer my publisher, by way of temporary compensation, five poems by my friend Frau Wesendonck which I had set to music (consisting chiefly of studies for Tristan with which I was occupied at the time)".