the crowds of dogs and swine who think that because they pay the entrance fee they have the right to dictate to me my selections. I hate to play for this rabble ... [In] a very short time our gracious Kaiser will smile on my request and recall me to Berlin ... Our Kaiser will be prevailed upon to see the benefit to the Fatherland of my obtaining a divorce and making you my own." Later career, 1919–1933 Muck returned to a different Germany. The recent German Revolution of 1918–1919 made him "a man in marked disfavor with the republican government." The death of his beloved wife Anita on April 14, 1921 left him "infinitely lonesome". Muck eventually took the helm of the Hamburg Philharmonic Orchestra in 1922 and made additional recordings. He returned to Bayreuth when the festival was revived there in 1924, the representative of the pre-war tradition. He expressed his devotion to the Festival and Wagner's music in a letter advising Fritz Busch that all he needed to succeed there was "the unassuming humility and the holy fanaticism of the Believer." He was also engaged in Munich, Amsterdam (Concertgebouw Orchestra) and Salzburg (Don Giovanni in 1925). In September 1930, he resigned his position at Bayreuth, much to the distress of Winifred Wagner, who had just succeeded her late husband Siegfried Wagner as the Festival's director. He never accommodated himself to being upstaged by Toscanini, but writing privately to Winifred Wagner, he said he had been committed to serving her husband, but the Festival now required someone other than "I, whose artistic standpoint and convictions, so far as is concerned, stem from the preceding century." He resigned his Hamburg position in 1933, uncomfortable with the Nazi authorities' direction of the city's symphony and opera. His last noteworthy appearance came in February 1933 at a concert marking the fiftieth anniversary of Wagner's death, given in Leipzig with Hitler in attendance. His final concert was on May 19, 1933, with the Hamburg Philharmonic. In October 1939, Muck "on his 80th birthday in Berlin received from Adolf Hitler the Plaque of the German Eagle" with the inscription DEM GROSSEN DIRIGENTEN (TO THE GREAT CONDUCTOR). A widower since 1921, whose only child, a son, had died young, Muck spent his last years at the Stuttgart home of Baroness von Scholley, the daughter of one of his oldest friends and fellow internee, who