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[CONTENTS]

RICHARD WAGNER
HIS LIFE AND HIS DRAMAS
A Biographical Study of the Man and an Explanation
of His Work

BY

W.J. HENDERSON

AUTHOR OF “THE STORY OF MUSIC,” “PRELUDES AND STUDIES,”
“WHAT IS GOOD MUSIC?” ETC.

G.P. PUTNAM’S SONS
NEW YORK AND LONDON
The Knickerbocker Press
1902

Copyright, 1901
BY
W.J. HENDERSON

Set up, electrotyped, and printed, November, 1901
Reprinted February, 1902

The Knickerbocker Press, New York

Richard Wagner

TO
ROBERT EDWIN BONNER

PREFACE

The purpose of this book is to supply Wagner lovers with a single work which shall meet all their needs. The author has told the story of Wagner's life, explained his artistic aims, given the history of each of his great works, examined its literary sources, shown how Wagner utilised them, surveyed the musical plan of each drama, and set forth the meaning and purpose of its principal ideas. The work is not intended to be critical, but is designed to be expository. It aims to help the Wagner lover to a thorough knowledge and understanding of the man and his works.

The author has consulted all the leading biographies, and for guidance in the direction of absolute trustworthiness he is directly indebted to Mme. Cosima Wagner, whose suggestions have been carefully observed. He is also under a large, but not heavy, burden of obligation to Mr. Henry Edward Krehbiel, musical critic of The New York Tribune, who carefully read the manuscript of this work and pointed out its errors. The value of Mr. Krehbiel's revision and his hints cannot be over-estimated. Thanks are also due to Mr. Emil Paur, conductor of the Philharmonic Society, of New York, for certain inquiries made in Europe.

The records of first performances have been prepared with great care and with no little labour. For the dates of those at most of the European cities the author is indebted to an elaborate article by E. Kastner, published in the Allgemeine Musik. Zeitung, of Berlin, for July and August, 1896. The original casts have been secured, as far as possible, from the programmes. For that of the "Flying Dutchman" at Dresden—incorrectly given in many books on Wagner—the author is indebted to Hofkapellmeister Ernst von Schuch, who obtained it from the records of the Hoftheater. The name of the singer of the Herald in the first cast of "Lohengrin," missing in all the published histories, was supplied by Hermann Wolff, of Berlin, from the records of Weimar. The casts of first performances in this country are not quite complete, simply because the journalists of twenty-five years ago did not realise their obligations to posterity. The casts were not published in full. The records have disappeared. The theatres in some cases—as in that of the Stadt—have long ago gone out of existence and nothing can be done. As far as given the casts are, the author believes, perfectly correct.

[CONTENTS]

[PART I]—THE LIFE OF WAGNER

[PART II]—THE ARTISTIC AIMS OF WAGNER

[PART III]—THE GREAT MUSIC DRAMAS

[PART I]
THE LIFE OF WAGNER

RICHARD WAGNER

[CHAPTER I]
THE BOYHOOD OF A GENIUS

“O kindischer Held! O herrlicher Knabe.”—Siegfried

The ancestry of Richard Wagner has been traced as far as his grandfather. This good man was Gottlob Friedrich Wagner, a custom house official, whose life-work it was to see that nothing was smuggled into Leipsic through the city gates. Gottlob Friedrich had a son to whom was given the second name of his father. Friedrich Wagner was a clerk of police. He had a considerable acquaintance with languages, and spoke French so well that when the French army under Napoleon occupied the city, he was appointed by Marshal Davoust to organise the police. Wagner's father was born in 1770, and his life was short. It is known that he had a taste for the theatre and for verse. After the battles of October 18 and 19, 1813, at the gates of Leipsic, when Napoleon's power was broken in Germany, the accumulation of dead around the city caused an epidemic fever, and among its victims was the police clerk Wagner. He passed away on November 22, 1813, leaving among other children a male babe of six months, destined to immortalise his name. This child was Wilhelm Richard Wagner, born May 22, 1813, in "The House of the Red and White Lion," No. 88 Hause Brühl.

Wagner's mother, whom his father married in 1798, was Johanna Rosina Bertz, who died in 1848. Richard was the youngest of nine children, the others being Albert, Carl Gustav, Johanna Rosalie, Carl Julius, Luise Constanze, Clara Wilhelmine, Maria Theresia, and Wilhelmine Ottilie. Of these Albert became an actor and singer of considerable importance and finally stage manager in Berlin. He married Elise Gollmann, a singer with a remarkably extensive voice, who is said to have sung "Tancredi" and "The Queen of the Night" equally well. She bore him a daughter, Johanna, who became one of the most eminent sopranos of her time, and was the original Elizabeth in "Tannhäuser" at the age of seventeen. Wagner's sister Johanna Rosalie was an actress and Clara was a singer.

When the epidemic had carried off the police clerk, the widow was in straitened circumstances. Her oldest son was only fourteen years old and not competent to contribute to the support of the large family. The governmental pension was small and she had no fortune of her own. At this trying period Ludwig Geyer, an old friend of her husband, asked her to be his wife, and although only nine months had elapsed since Friedrich Wagner's death, she, like a sensible woman, accepted the offer. Geyer was a man of talent and well fitted to be the parental guide of the young Richard. He was an actor, a singer, an author, and a portrait painter. As a singer he once appeared in "Joseph in Egypt," when that opera was produced by Weber on his assumption of the conductor's bâton at the Dresden opera. His gift for portrait painting is said almost to have reached genius. He was the writer of several comedies, and one of his plays, "The Slaughter of the Innocents," is still well known in Germany. To celebrate the sixtieth birthday of Richard Wagner his family at Bayreuth surprised him with a performance of this play, and he was much touched by it, for he always cherished a deep affection for his stepfather.

Owing to the employment of Geyer in a Dresden theatre, the whole family removed to that city. Here the education of the future composer began in earnest. The home influences were the example of Geyer and the sweet, gentle affection of the mother, to whom her children were the first of all considerations. The outside influence was found in the Dresden Kreuzschule, where the boy was entered under the name of Richard Geyer. This schooling, however, was not begun till after the death of the stepfather. In the beginning Geyer thought that Richard would make a good painter, but, the composer tells us in his autobiographic sketch, "I showed a very poor talent for drawing." Geyer died on September 30, 1821, still cherishing the belief that there was some sort of promise in the boy. "Shortly before his death," says the brief autobiography, "I had learnt to play 'Ueb' immer Treu und Redlichkeit' and the then newly published 'Jungfernkranz' upon the pianoforte; the day before his death I was bid to play him both these pieces in the adjoining room; I heard him then with feeble voice say to my mother: 'Has he perchance a talent for music?' On the early morrow, as he lay dead, my mother came into the children's sleeping room and said to each of us some loving word. To me she said: 'He hoped to make something of thee.' I remember, too, that for a long time I imagined that something indeed would come of me."

Wagner was eight years old when his stepfather died, and in order that the mother's cares might be lightened, he was sent for a year to live with a brother of Geyer at Eisleben, where he attended a private school. It was in December, 1822, that he began to go to the Kreuzschule in Dresden. If ever there was a childhood in which the future man was foreshadowed it was that of Wagner. His biographers have with one accord set down the statement that the boy showed no promise in his early years. Look at them and see for yourself. At the Kreuzschule he conceived a profound love for the classicism of Homer, and to the delight of his teacher, Herr Silig, translated the first twelve books of the Odyssey out of school hours. He revelled in the fascinations of mythology, and his fancy was so stimulated that when commemorative verses on the death of one of the boys were asked for, Wagner's, having been pruned of some extravagances, were crowned with the halo of type.

Thereupon this child of eleven resolved to become a poet. He projected vast tragedies on the plan of Apel's "Polyeidos" and "Die Aetolier." He plunged into the deeps of Shakespeare and translated a speech of Romeo into metrical German. Finally he began a grand tragedy, which proved to be compounded of elements from "Hamlet" and "King Lear." He laboured on this for two years. "The plan," he says, "was gigantic in the extreme; two-and-forty human beings died in the course of this piece, and I saw myself compelled in its working out to call the greater number back as ghosts, since otherwise I should have been short of characters for my last acts."

Huge poetic projects already throbbing in the young brain, music, too, seized him for her own. He would not stay away from the piano, and so the tutor who was guiding him through the mazes of Cornelius Nepos engaged to teach him the technic of the instrument. But the wayward Wagner would not practice. The moment that the tutor's back was turned he began to strum the music of "Der Freischütz" by ear, and he learned to perform the overture with "fearful fingering." The teacher overheard him and said that nothing would come of his piano studies. And so it proved, for Wagner never learned to play the piano. Yet was there nothing in all this to show the bent of the young mind? Was it not a childhood meet for him who was one day to project tragedies before undreamed of on the lyric stage, and to cut loose from all the traditions of operatic music? And was it not a good omen when at last there fell across his childhood the shadow of his artistic progenitor, Weber? "When Weber passed our house on his way to the theatre," writes Wagner, "I used to watch him with something akin to religious awe!" Indeed, Weber used to enter the house to talk to the sweet Frau Geyer, who was well liked among artists, and so perhaps the little Richard looked into the luminous depths of the eyes of the composer of "Der Freischütz."

Weber became the idol of his boyhood, and no doubt the worship of this real genius had some influence on the bent of Wagner's musical thought. It is narrated of him that, when he was not permitted to go to the theatre to hear "Der Freischütz," he used to stand in the corner of a room at home and count the minutes, specifying just what was going on at each particular instant and finally weeping, so that his mother would yield and send him happy off to the performance. However, in 1827 the family returned to Leipsic and that was the end of young Richard's close observation of Weber. A still more serious influence now entered into his life, for at the concerts of the Leipsic Gewandhaus he first heard the works of Beethoven. The overture to "Egmont" fired him with a desire to preface his own drama with such a piece of music. So he borrowed a copy of Logier's treatise on harmony and counterpoint and tried to learn its contents in a week. This was the crucial test of his genius. If he had not been born to be a composer, the difficulties which he encountered in his solitary struggle with the science of music would have turned him aside from the study forever. But it was not so. He says in his autobiography: "Its difficulties both provoked and fascinated me; I resolved to become a musician." And thus we find Wagner, whose childhood has been pronounced insignificant, at the age of fifteen already a dramatist and eager to be a composer. To be sure, he was not a prodigy, but the future of the man was marked out plainly by the child; and we shall see that from this time he moved steadily toward the goal of his ambition.

The progress was not accomplished without a struggle. As he himself tells us in his autobiography, his family now unearthed his great tragedy, and he was severely admonished that in the future it would be well for him to give less attention to Melpomene and more to his text-books. But he was not to be turned aside from his purpose. "Under such circumstances," he says, "I breathed no word of my secret discovery of a calling for music; but nevertheless I composed, in silence, a sonata, a quartet, and an aria. When I felt myself sufficiently matured in my private musical studies, I ventured forth at last with their announcement. Naturally, I now had many a hard battle to wage, for my relatives could only consider my penchant for music as a fleeting passion—all the more as it was unsupported by any proofs of preliminary study, and especially by any already won dexterity in handling a musical instrument." We laugh, perhaps, at this awkward boy in his lumbering struggles, but there was something large in it all. He aimed at the top, and from the outset, pathetically enough, as it afterward proved, tried to hitch his "waggon to a star."

The family so far humoured his new ambition as to engage a music teacher for him, Gottlieb Müller, afterward organist at Altenburg. But a sorry time this honest man had with his eccentric young pupil. The boy was at this time head over ears in the romanticism of Ernst Theodor Hoffmann, then recently dead and still in the height of his fame in Germany. The astounding fecundity of this writer's invention of marvellous incidents inflamed the boy's mind, and threw him into a state of continual nervous excitement. He says himself that he had day-dreams in which the keynote, third and dominant, seemed to take form and to reveal to him their mighty meanings. But he would not study systematically, and his family apparently had ground for believing that music would soon be abandoned for some other fancy. Instead of treading patiently the rocky path of counterpoint, the impatient boy endeavoured at one leap to reach the top of the musical mountain, and wrote overtures for orchestra. One of them was actually performed in a theatre in Leipsic under the direction of Heinrich Dorn. It was, as Wagner confessed, the culminating point of his folly. The parts of the string instruments in score were written in red ink, those of the wood in green, and those of the brass in black. "Beethoven's Ninth Symphony," he says, "was a mere Pleyel sonata by the side of this marvellously concocted overture." At every fourth measure the tympani player had a note to be played forte, and when the audience had recovered from its astonishment at this wonderful effect, it burst into laughter.

But all these strivings were not in vain. As Adolphe Jullien notes in his "Richard Wagner," the influence of the Hoffmann stories was not lost; "for the 'Brothers of Serapion' contained an account of the poetical tourney at Wartburg, and some germs of 'The Meistersinger' are found in another story by Hoffmann, 'Master Martin, the Cooper of Nuremberg.'" Dorn, the conductor, became interested in young Wagner, and afterwards proved to be a valuable friend. The boy modestly and sincerely thanked him for producing the overture, and Dorn replied that he had at once perceived the boy's talent and that furthermore the orchestration had not needed extensive revision. Wagner now seemed to feel his own need of some sort of regular study, for he matriculated at the University of Leipsic, chiefly in order that he might attend the lectures on æsthetics and philosophy. Here again his want of application made itself apparent, and he entered into the dissipations of student life with avidity. But he soon wearied of them and once more settled down to the study of music, this time under Theodor Weinlig, who sat in the honoured seat of Bach as the cantor of the Thomas School.

In less than half a year Weinlig had taught the boy to solve the hardest problems of counterpoint, and said to him, "What you have made your own by this dry study, we call self-dependence." At this time, too, Wagner became acquainted with the music of Mozart and its influence upon his mind was very healthful. He laboured to rid himself of bombast and to attain a nobler simplicity. He wrote a piano sonata in which he strove for a "natural, unforced style in composition." This sonata was published by Breitkopf and Härtel, and was, so far as the records show, Wagner's real Opus 1. It shows no trace of inspiration, and can rank only as a conservatory exercise.

It was followed by a polonaise in D for four hands, Opus 2, and this was also printed by Breitkopf and Härtel. It is nothing more than school work, like its predecessor. The third work was a fantasia in F sharp minor for piano. The restraining power of the teacher is less apparent in this composition, which remains unpublished. In his article on Wagner in Grove's "Dictionary of Music," Mr. Edward Dannreuther quotes at some length from a personal conversation with the composer, who described Weinlig's method of teaching. It was a plain and practical method, in which example and precept were judiciously combined. Wagner said to Mr. Dannreuther, "The true lesson consisted in his patient and careful inspection of what had been written." It was fortunate for Wagner that he had such a mentor, and that he was in the beginning of his career as a composer compelled to learn and practice the old forms in which the fundamental laws of music found their perfect exemplification. His readiness to depart from the straight and narrow path would have led him into insuperable difficulties, and perhaps to hopeless discouragement, had he not possessed so kind and trustworthy a guide.

Young Wagner now launched upon musical activities of no small magnitude for one so youthful. In the year 1830 he made a pianoforte transcription of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony, and in a letter dated Oct. 6 he offered it to the Messrs. Schott, of Mayence. The offer was not accepted. He also wrote to the Peters Bureau de Musique, offering to make piano arrangements at less than the usual rates. In 1831 he composed two overtures, one a "Concert Ouvertüre mit Fuge" in C, and the other in D minor. This one is dated Sept. 26, with emendations dated Nov. 4. It was performed at one of the Gewandhaus concerts on Dec. 25, 1831. The Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung said of it: "Much pleasure was given us by a new overture by a composer still very young, Herr Richard Wagner. The piece was thoroughly appreciated, and, indeed, the young man promises much: the composition not only sounds well, but it has ideas and it is written with care and skill, with an evident striving after the noblest."[1]

In 1832, when he was 19 years old, he wrote a symphony in C major.[2] The biographers of Wagner have agreed to disagree about this symphony, even the usually accurate Mr. Finck calling it a work in C minor. It is, however, plainly enough in C major. The history of this composition was peculiar. When he had finished it Wagner put it in his trunk and started for Vienna, "for no other purpose than to get a glimpse of this famed musical centre. What I heard and saw there was not to my edification; wherever I went I heard 'Zampa' or Strauss's potpourris on 'Zampa'—two things that were an abomination to me, especially at that time." On the homeward journey he tarried a while in Prague, where he made the acquaintance of Dionys Weber, director of the Conservatory. This gentleman's pupils rehearsed the symphony. The score was next submitted to the directors of the Gewandhaus concerts at Leipsic.

The managing director was Rochlitz, editor of the Allgemeine Musikalische Zeitung, an authority on music, and he invited Wagner to call on him. "When I presented myself, the stately old gentleman raised his spectacles, saying, 'You are a young man indeed! I expected an older and more experienced composer.'" The symphony was tried, and on Jan. 10, 1833, it was produced at a Gewandhaus concert. In the season of 1834-5 Wagner, who was in Leipsic, forced his score on the attention of Mendelssohn, then the conductor of the Gewandhaus concerts, in the hope of getting another performance. Mendelssohn put the manuscript away, and, though he often saw Wagner, never spoke of the work. Wagner was too modest to ask him about it, and so the score was lost. In 1872 the orchestral parts were found in an old trunk left by Wagner in Dresden in the course of the revolutionary disturbances of 1849.

With the composition of this symphony, Wagner's apprenticeship in instrumental music may be said to have ended. His next venture was across that magic border which separates the orchestra from the stage. His period of juvenility was not quite ended, but he may be said to have finished the preparatory stage of his career and to be about to enter on the first years of serious struggle toward his real goal. His boyhood was fairly indicative of his nature. Restless, dissatisfied, eager to reach the topmost heights, and not suited with the means at hand, we yet find him experimenting with the methods of those who preceded him, analysing and assimilating the musical past, and learning to conquer musical forms. In the juvenile symphony he showed that he had honestly solved the problems of construction, that he had mastered the formal materials of his art. The wise Schumann said, "Mastery of form leads talent to ever increasing freedom." At nineteen years of age, with the methods of Beethoven and Mozart firmly fixed in his mind, the young Wagner had produced a symphonic composition, which, while imitative in both themes and treatment, showed astonishing musical vigour and an enterprising spirit. The boy was on the verge of manhood, artistically as well as physically.

[CHAPTER II]
THE FIRST OPERAS

“You are a young man indeed!”—Rochlitz to Wagner

In the year 1832, while he was in Prague, Wagner began his career as a composer of operas, and in his first attempt, as in all later ones, wrote his own libretto. His friend Heinrich Laube[3] had offered him a libretto on the subject of Kosciuszko, but he refused it, saying that he was engaged wholly on instrumental music. But his genius was for the stage, and his boyhood had been surrounded by the immediate influences of the theatre. It is, therefore, not surprising to find him at work on an opera. He says in his autobiography: "In that city [Prague] I also composed an opera book of tragic contents, 'Die Hochzeit.' I know not whence I had come by the mediæval subject matter:—a frantic lover climbs to the window of the sleeping-chamber of his friend's bride, wherein she is awaiting the advent of the bridegroom; the bride struggles with the madman and hurls him into the courtyard below, where his mangled body gives up the ghost. During the funeral ceremony the bride, uttering one cry, sinks lifeless on the corpse. Returning to Leipsic, I set to work at once on the composition of this opera's first number, which contained a grand sextet that much pleased Weinlig. The text-book found no favour with my sister; I destroyed its every trace."

We are indebted to the good Rosalie for her objections to this stupid and unpoetic book. Wagner's memory in regard to this juvenile work was not perfect. He presented an autograph of the numbers composed to the Würzburg Musikverein. They are an introduction, a chorus, and a septet, not a sextet as he said. This autograph copy is still extant. Franz Muncker, in his "Life of Wagner," says that the young librettist found his subject in Immermann's "Cardenio und Celinde" (1826), and that he arranged the conclusion of his story after that of the "Bride of Messina." The whole matter, however, may be dismissed as unimportant.

Wagner now went to Würzburg, and at the age of twenty sought employment as a musician through the influence of his brother Albert, then engaged in the Würzburg Theatre as actor, singer, and stage manager. Albert succeeded in securing for him a position as chorus master at ten florins a month. As an evidence of his gratitude he composed for Albert an aria of 142 measures to substitute for a shorter one in Marschner's "Der Vampyr." A phototype reproduction of this aria may be found in Wilhelm Tappert's "R. Wagner; Sein Leben und Seine Werke." It has no especial interest except for collectors of Wagneriana.

In the year 1833 the young composer set to work on another opera. This was entitled "Die Feen," and although it was completed, its fate was not unlike that of its predecessor. It came to nothing in the composer's life, and though finished on Dec. 7, 1833, received its first performance in Munich on Jan. 29, 1888. Perhaps the best short account of this work that can be given is that of Wagner himself in his "Communication to my Friends."[4] He says:

"On the model of one of Gozzi's fairy tales ['La donna serpente'] I wrote for myself an opera text in verse, 'Die Feen' [The Fairies]; the then predominant romantic opera of Weber, and also of Marschner—who about this time made his first appearance on the scene, and that at my place of sojourn, Leipsic—determined me to follow in their footsteps. What I turned out for myself was nothing more than barely what I wanted, an opera text; this I set to music according to the impressions made upon me by Weber, Beethoven, and Marschner. However, what took my fancy in the tale of Gozzi was not merely its adaptability for an opera text, but the fascination of the 'stuff' itself. A fairy, who renounces immortality for the sake of a human lover, can only become a mortal through the fulfilment of certain hard conditions, the non-compliance wherewith on the part of her earthly swain threatens her with the direst penalties; her lover fails in the test, which consists in this, that however evil and repulsive she may appear to him (in an obligatory metamorphosis) he shall not reject her in his unbelief. In Gozzi's tale the fairy is now changed into a snake; the remorseful lover frees her from the spell by kissing the snake: thus he wins her for his wife. I altered this dénouement by changing the fairy into a stone and then releasing her from the spell by her lover's passionate song; while the lover—instead of being allowed to carry the bride off to his own country—is himself admitted by the Fairy King to the immortal bliss of Fairyland, together with his fairy wife."

This opera was offered to the director of the theatre at Leipsic, whither Wagner returned early in 1834, and it is evident that a production was promised, for Laube announced in his journal that immediately after "Le Bal Masqué" by Auber there would be brought forward the first opera of a young composer named Richard Wagner. But when Auber's work had completed its run, the director announced Bellini's "I Capuletti ed i Montecchi," and that was the end of "Die Feen" till 1888. Some of the commentators have found the germs of important features of Wagner's later works in this opera, but there is really no evidence that any direct connection exists. It is true that the story is mythical, but Wagner departed from the myth in his next opera. It is, perhaps, more significant that already the young writer showed some skill in the management of pictorial stage effects. The music was wholly imitative of Beethoven, Weber, and Marschner, with some minor borrowings from Mozart. Here and there can be found musical ideas which recur in later works and which are characteristic of Wagner. The score was constructed on the Italian opera model and contains the regular series of arias, scenas, cavatinas, etc. It has even a "mad scene." Furthermore it is a strikingly melodious score, and very light in touch. But the work has now only a historical interest, and its occasional performances in Munich, about the time that the foreign pilgrims to Bayreuth are in the land, are purely speculative enterprises.

Now came another change in the inner life of this budding genius. In the performance of Bellini's opera, he heard for the first time the great artist Wilhelmina Schroeder-Devrient, and the impression which she made upon him was lasting. As late as 1872 he said, "Whenever I conceived a character, I saw her." The imposing effect which her dramatic sincerity and her consummate command of style enabled her to make with the shallow music of Bellini caused Wagner to become doubtful as to the right method of attaining success. He was powerfully impressed with the importance of the dramatic element in operatic performance. The Leipsic Theatre next produced Auber's "La Muette de Portici," and again Wagner was astonished. Here he saw an opera in which rapid action, fiery impulse, and the manifestations of a revolutionary spirit achieved as strong an effect upon an audience as had the potent acting and singing of Schroeder-Devrient.

The light, spontaneous melody of Bellini seemed to him to express more directly the spirit of young life than the heavy music of the Germans; the plan of Auber's work impressed him as well fitted for combination with the style and character of the Italian music. A union of the two, he thought, would lead toward a true embodiment of the spirit of the time, and so reach swiftly the public heart. The joy of life now became his battle cry. He steeped his soul in the physical literature of the time. He read with avidity the works of Wilhelm Heinse, "the apostle of the highest artistic and lowest sensual pleasures, amongst all the authors of the last century the one endowed with the warmest enthusiasm and finest comprehension for music."[5] "I was then twenty-one years of age," wrote Wagner, "inclined to take life and the world on their pleasant side. 'Ardinghello' (Heinse) and 'Das junge Europa' (Laube) tingled through every limb, while Germany appeared in my eyes a very tiny portion of the earth." Ludwig Börne, Carl Gutzgow, Gustav König, and last of all, Heinrich Heine, became influences in his daily life and thought. The utmost freedom in politics, morals, and literature, the most passionate physical enjoyment of the fleeting moment, were taught by these authors, to whom the reactionary movement in France against all moral and artistic law seemed most attractive. Mysticism ceased to charm Wagner, and he turned to revolutionary freedom in thought as the highest possible good.

With these ideas seething in his mind in the summer of 1834, while spending his holiday at Teplitz, he sketched the plot of his next opera, "Das Liebesverbot [Prohibition of Love] or the Novice of Palermo." In the fall he was obliged to accept a position as conductor in a small operatic theatre in Magdeburg. There he found in the ease with which public success was attained by trivial works further encouragement for the revolt in his soul. He discharged his duties as conductor with the greatest pleasure, and took much trouble to give an impressive performance of Auber's "Lestocq." He had his "Feen" overture played, and also an overture of his own to Apel's drama, "Christopher Columbus." He made a New Year's piece out of the andante of his symphony and some songs taken from a musical farce. But meanwhile he worked assiduously at the score of his new opera, with Auber as his model and Schroeder-Devrient as his hope.

The foundation of the story was taken from Shakespeare's "Measure for Measure," but Wagner altered the plot so as to introduce the revolutionary element which at that time played so conspicuous a part in his fancies. In a "Communication to My Friends" Wagner many years afterward thus described his opera: "It was Isabella that inspired me; she who leaves her novitiate in the cloister to plead with a hard-hearted Stateholder for mercy for her brother, who in pursuance of a draconic edict has been condemned to death for entering on a forbidden, yet Nature-hallowed, love-bond with a maiden. Isabella's chaste soul urges on the stony judge such cogent reasons for pardoning the offence, her agitation helps her to paint these reasons in such entrancing warmth of colour that the stern protector of morals is himself seized with passionate love for the superb woman. This sudden, flaming passion proclaims itself by his promising the pardon of the brother as the price of the lovely sister's favours. Aghast at this proposal, Isabella takes refuge in artifice to unmask the hypocrite and save her brother. The Stateholder, whom she has vouchsafed a fictitious indulgence, still thinks to withhold the stipulated pardon so as not to sacrifice his stern judicial conscience to a passing lapse from virtue. Shakespeare disentangles the resulting situation by means of the public return of the Duke, who had hitherto observed events from under a disguise; his decision is an earnest one, and grounded on the judge's maxim, 'measure for measure.' I, on the other hand, unloosed the knot without the Prince's aid by means of a revolution. The scene of action I transferred to the capital of Sicily, in order to bring in the Southern heat of blood to help me with my scheme; I also made the Stateholder, a Puritanical German, forbid a projected carnival; while a madcap youngster, in love with Isabella, incites the populace to mask and keep their weapons ready: 'Who will not dance at our behest, your steel shall pierce him through the breast!' The Stateholder, himself induced by Isabella to come disguised to their rendezvous, is discovered, unmasked, and hooted; the brother in the nick of time is freed by force from the executioner's hands; Isabella renounces her novitiate and gives her hand to the young leader of the carnival. In full procession the maskers go forth to meet their home-returning Prince, assured that he will at least not govern them so crookedly as had his deputy."

One has no difficulty in tracing in this arrangement of the story the ideas that lay uppermost in Wagner's mind at the time. The heavy, hypocritical governor was a hit at his own countrymen, and the free life of the Sicilians was his embodiment of the sensuousness which he had learned from his recent readings to admire. Auber's "Muette de Portici" no doubt suggested the theatrical value of the revolution, and as he himself says in his account of the writing and production of this opera: "Recollections of the 'Sicilian Vespers' may have had something to do with it; and when I think finally that the gentle Sicilian Bellini may also be counted among the factors of this composition, I positively have to laugh at the amazing quid-pro-quo into which these extraordinary conceptions shaped themselves."[6]

The score of the opera was finished in the winter of 1835-36. The composer, who was entitled to a benefit as conductor toward the close of the season, naturally hoped to bring forward his work on that occasion. Unfortunately the manager was in arrears of salary to many of the company, and some of the principal artists gave notice of their intended departure before the end of March. Wagner, who was liked by all of them, succeeded in persuading them to stay a few days longer and to endeavour hastily to prepare his opera. Ten days were available for rehearsals. By dint of shouting, gesticulating, and singing with the singers, Wagner persuaded himself and them into thinking that the opera was in shape for production. There was a good advance sale of seats, but the manager stepped in and claimed the first performance of the work for himself, and so Wagner was perforce content to wait for the second for his benefit.

The first performance on March 29, 1836, was, according to Wagner's own account of it, absolutely incomprehensible. There were no libretti, and the singers were so uncertain of both text and music that no one could learn the story of the work from them. This was probably well for Wagner in one way, for the censor had passed the book on Wagner's assurance that the subject was from Shakespeare, and as the audience did not know what it was all about, no unfavourable comment was made on the licentious story. At the second performance, owing to the apparent incomprehensibility of the work when first heard, there were three persons in the auditorium, two of whom were the composer's landlord and landlady. Before the curtain went up, the husband of the prima donna, jealous of the tenor, set upon that singer and beat him so that he had to be carried from the theatre. The prima donna tried to interfere and she was also assaulted by her husband. A general fight seemed imminent, and the manager went before the curtain to tell the audience of three that "owing to various adverse circumstances which had arisen the opera could not be given." Wagner subsequently offered this opera to managers in Leipsic and Berlin, but it was not accepted. Later in Paris he contemplated a performance at the Théâtre de la Renaissance, and a translation of the text was begun. But, as Wagner tells us, "Everything promised well, when the Théâtre de la Renaissance became bankrupt! All trouble, all hopes had therefore been in vain. I now gave up my 'Liebesverbot' entirely; I felt that I could not respect myself any longer as its composer."

Mr. Finck recounts an interesting conversation he had with Heinrich Vogl, the eminent Wagnerian tenor, in 1891. Vogl said that after the success of "Die Feen" at Munich it was thought that "Das Liebesverbot" might also be given, and a rehearsal was held. The "ludicrous and undisguised imitation of Donizetti and other popular composers of that time" caused general laughter,[7] but it was really the licentious character of the libretto that brought about an abandonment of the plan to perform the work. But the composer had not yet found himself, and this was one of his attempts to reach success as others had reached it, without any realisation of the vital fact that he was not artistically constituted as they were.

The failure of the Magdeburg Theatre once more threw Wagner on his own resources. He had borrowed money recklessly, hoping to pay it from the proceeds of the performance of his opera. Poor Wagner! All his life he was ahead of his income, and no amount of experience could teach him to manage his finances. He went to Berlin to offer the "Liebesverbot" to the opera, but without success, and then he heard that there was an opening as musical director at the Königsberg Theatre. To that city, therefore, he went in the hope of securing the post. His Magdeburg friends, Frau Pollert, the prima donna, and Wilhelmina Planer, the actress, had found employment there, and the young composer was drawn after the second of these women by ties soon to become closer. He wrote to his friend Dorn to ask his aid, but it seems that the good Heinrich was unable to do anything for him. Nevertheless the Königsberg post was given to him and he began his duties in January, 1837, after nine months of idleness. Before taking this position Wagner had done two things which must now be recorded. He had written his first prose essay, and he had married. The essay contained some unwise comments on the "Euryanthe" of Weber, whom Wagner as a boy had venerated. He subsequently experienced a second change of heart in regard to this composer. He had a change of heart, too, in regard to his wife, also partly on artistic grounds. Glasenapp says of this hasty and ill-fated union:

"The link was now forged that bound his future to a helpmate with whom he had the smallest possible community of inner feeling. Beyond doubt, he brought her that genuine affection which survived the hardest trials it ever was put to; beyond doubt, the pretty, young, and popular actress meant well by the ardent young conductor when she joined her hand with his at a time of so little outward prospect; beyond doubt she expected much from his abilities.... Any profounder sense of the enormous artistic significance of her husband never dawned upon her, either in this cloudy period or at a later date; and though she made him loving sacrifices, she neither had the blissful satisfaction of knowing to whom they were offered, nor of affording the struggling artist a sympathetic ear in which to pour his deeper woes. Wagner never forgot how she bore the trials of the next few changeful years without a murmur; nevertheless, this precipitate marriage of two natures so immiscible dragged after it an almost endless chain of sorrows and internal conflicts."

[CHAPTER III]
KÖNIGSBERG AND RIGA

“To extricate myself from the petty commerce of the German stage.”—Wagner

Minna Planer, as she was called, was the daughter of a spindle-maker, and according to Praeger,[8] who knew her well, went on the stage not because she was endowed with histrionic talent, but because it was necessary for her to contribute to the support of her father's family. Wagner had become engaged to her while at Magdeburg, and he married her on Nov. 24, 1836, at Königsberg. He was twenty-three years old and the wisdom of his marriage was what might have been expected of a boy. From all the testimony it appears that the first wife of Richard Wagner was a good, gentle, loving woman, devoted to him in a mild, unimpassioned manner, and utterly incapable of understanding him. At the outset of their married life, she was almost as improvident as he, and the burden of debt which he had accumulated at Magdeburg grew larger at Königsberg. Later at Riga these two poor children lived in a house in the outskirts of a town and had to take a cab whenever they went to the theatre!

In later years Minna learned the meaning of economy, and she struggled bravely to make both ends meet, when there was nothing but ends. But never did she perceive the genius of her husband, and for that reason she was always impatient with his dreams of great achievements, when money could have been earned by prosaic labour at the expense of hazy aspirations. A woman of tender eye and sweet speech, she commanded the sympathy of Wagner's friends, and it was indeed a fatal misfortune for this gentle dove that she was mismated with an eagle. Certainly she suffered much and bore with patience, not only the privations of domestic life in straitened circumstances, but also the waywardness and eccentricities of a mind beyond her comprehension. Praeger says:

"As years rolled by and the genius of Wagner assumed more definite shape and grew in strength, she was less able to comprehend the might of his intellect. To have written the 'Novice of Palermo' at twenty-three and to have been received so cordially was to her unambitious heart the zenith of success. More than that she could not understand, nor did she ever realise the extent of the wondrous gifts of her husband. After twenty years of wedded life it was much the same. We were sitting at lunch in the trimly kept Swiss châlet at Zurich in the summer of 1856, waiting for the composer of the then completed 'Rienzi,' 'Dutchman,' 'Tannhäuser' and 'Lohengrin' to come down from his scoring of the 'Nibelungen,' when in full innocence she asked me, 'Now, honestly, is Richard such a great genius?' On another occasion, when he was bitterly animadverting on his treatment by the public, she said, 'Well, Richard, why don't you write something for the gallery?'"

That there was another side to the story is certain. From the beginning, though tender and considerate of his wife when at her side, and fully awake to her excellencies, Wagner was a victim of those irregularities of temperament which seem inseparable from genius, especially musical genius. He was inconstant as the wind, a rover, a faithless husband. His misdoings amounted to more than peccadilloes. He was guilty of many liaisons and the Sybaritic character of his self-indulgences increased as the years went by. It is not possible to give the details of these secrets of Wagner's life; but it must suffice to say that while Minna was unsuited to him through her inability to understand him, she was more sinned against than sinning. She was a faithful and devoted wife, patient in adversity and modest in prosperity. It is impossible to say the same of him as a husband. For twenty-five years they struggled along together, and the history of their existence makes one sympathise deeply with this sweet little woman. Enduring the most bitter privations, she saw a husband, who could have earned a good living by writing for the popular taste, deliberately refusing to do so and following the promptings of what must have seemed to her the wildest dreams. This same husband was also luxurious in habit, and was always deeply in debt. The wolf was continually at the Wagner door, even when the master had what to a less fastidious person would have seemed abundance. Wagner, on the other hand, must have hungered and thirsted for a companion who would understand his ideals and his purposes, and be willing to wait with him for the triumph that was sure to come. That these two ill-mated persons would separate was almost inevitable. It may be briefly recorded at this point that they did separate in August, 1861. Minna went to live in Dresden, where she died on Jan. 25, 1866.

The grip of poverty in Königsberg seems to have strangled the voice of Wagner's muse. He says in the Autobiography: "The year which I spent in Königsberg was completely lost to my art by reason of the pressure of petty cares. I wrote one solitary overture: 'Rule Britannia.'" He wrote also about this time an overture entitled "Polonia." The former is lost, but the Wagner family has the manuscript of the latter. The state of the composer's mind, and the actions to which it led are now best told in the "Communication to My Friends":

"One strong desire then arose in me, and developed into an all-consuming passion: to force my way out from the paltry squalor of my situation. This desire, however, was busied only in the second line with actual life; its front rank made towards a brilliant course as artist. To extricate myself from the petty commerce of the German stage, and straightway try my luck in Paris: this, in a word, was the goal I set before me. A romance by H. König, 'Die Hohe Braut,' had fallen into my hands; everything which I read had only an interest for me when viewed in the light of its adaptability for an operatic subject: in my mood of that time, the reading of this novel attracted me the more, as it soon conjured up in my eyes the vision of a grand opera in five acts for Paris. I drafted a complete sketch and sent it direct to Scribe in Paris with the prayer that he would work it up for the Grand Opéra there and get me appointed for its composition. Naturally this project ended in smoke."

The history of Wagner's first attempt to reach the goal of the opera composer of his day, the stage of the Grand Opéra in Paris, is worthy of particular note. He despatched the manuscript and a letter for Scribe to his brother-in-law, Friedrich Brockhaus, to send to Paris. Hearing nothing, he wrote again six months later, and sent to Scribe a copy of the score of "Das Liebesverbot" as a specimen of his work. Scribe answered this letter courteously and expressed interest in Wagner and his music. The composer again sent him a copy of the scenario of "Die Hohe Braut," but put it into the post without any stamps and so never heard of it again, nor received an answer from Scribe. These facts were recorded in an old note book in which Wagner made first draughts of his letters. The letter giving this information was addressed to one Lewald, a Leipsic journalist who had lived in Paris, and, after reciting the facts, Wagner asked him to find out whether Scribe had received the second letter and whether he was still favourably inclined. If so, Wagner said, he had another operatic plan in his mind, the book of "Rienzi," which was just the thing for Paris. This letter was published in the Frankfurter Zeitung, and will be found quoted in Mr. Finck's "Wagner." Nothing came of this correspondence, and Wagner was fated not to enter Paris till some time later, and then to find it a city of continual disappointment.

In the spring the Königsberg Theatre failed and again Wagner was out of employment. Like many other theatrical folk, the moment his salary stopped he was in straits. So once more he called upon Dorn for help. This critic had written of the "Rule Britannia" overture that it was a medley of Bach, Beethoven, and Bellini, but he still had faith in the genius of Wagner. So through his influence Wagner was appointed director of music in the theatre at Riga, on the Russian side of the Baltic, under Karl von Holtei as manager. Wagner's wife and her sister, Theresa Planer, were also engaged for the comedy performances. Riga was a more prosperous town than either Magdeburg or Königsberg and at first Wagner, delighted with the higher salary, set to work with evident pleasure. The material in the company was good, and the composer was sufficiently interested in the singers to write several airs for them. He also conducted ten orchestral concerts, at which his overtures, "Rule Britannia" and "Columbus," were performed. He began to write a comic opera entitled "Die Glückliche Bärenfamilie" ("The Happy Bear Family") for which he found the material in a story in the "Arabian Nights." "I had only composed two numbers for this," he says, "when I was disgusted to find that I was again on the high road to music-making à la Adam. My spirit, my deeper feelings, were wounded by this discovery, and I laid aside the work in horror. The daily studying and conducting of Auber's, Adam's, and Bellini's music contributed its share to a speedy undoing of my frivolous delight in such an enterprise."

That inexpressible dissatisfaction with the extant state of the theatre, which finally made Wagner the reformer of the lyric drama, was already at work. The purely commercial spirit of the play-house was rapidly becoming intolerably antagonistic to him. He held himself aloof from the actors. He lived far away from the theatre. He shut himself up within himself, and he began to cherish dreams of breaking the sordid bondage of the German stage and reaching out into a broader and more vigorous artistic atmosphere. He laboured assiduously at Riga for good performances. The manager begged him not to overwork the singers, but the singers liked his enthusiasm and seconded his efforts. At this time, in his unsettled state of mind, he worshipped Bellini, and exalted the Italian song above all other forms of operatic music. He had "Norma" performed for his benefit on Dec. 11, 1837. He wrote articles praising Bellini, and his enemies delighted to quote these forty years later as evidence of Wagner's inconsistency. This undeveloped youth of twenty-four was groping for the path toward which his genius impelled him. That he could not find it at once was not remarkable. He needed the discipline of a larger experience and a closer contact with the great world. As yet he had been but playing in the nursery. His first pointed lessons were about to be received.

In the spring of 1839 his contract with Holtei expired. He could not find employment. He even wrote to the director of the theatre offering to return as assistant director or copyist, in fact, to do anything except, as he ironically said, black boots or carry water. Nothing came of all this, and debts began to press heavily on this most improvident of men. He had a grand opera partly written. It was made on the Meyerbeerian last, and that was fashionable in Paris. Thither he determined to go. But when he endeavoured to leave Riga, he could not get a passport because of his debts. So with his wife and his dog, he stole away like a thief in the night. Minna went across the border into Germany disguised as the wife of a lumberman. Wagner himself was aided by a Königsberg friend, Abraham Möller, who hid him in an empty sentry box till he could slip past the pickets on the boundary line. This same Möller went with him to the port of Pillau, where he, his wife, and his dog embarked on a sailing vessel for London, thence to descend upon Paris.[9] Paris was to be assailed with one opera completed and another half done. This second work was "Rienzi." During the years of struggle at Magdeburg, Königsberg, and Riga, while searching for material for a grand opera book, he had read Bulwer's novel, "Rienzi," and the subject seemed to him to be promising. The grandeur of the plan and the opportunities for operatic effects fired his mind, and in the summer of 1838 he began the libretto. At Riga, when he was holding himself aloof from the surroundings of the theatre, he was at work composing the music, and in the spring of 1839 the first two acts were finished. He had aimed to make this an imposing work, too grand in plan for production at a provincial German theatre. So it was with this uncompleted score that he put to sea, a sea far vaster than he at the time imagined it to be. For before leaving Riga he had fallen upon Heine's version of the legend of the "Flying Dutchman," and this sea voyage was to make the story vital in his mind and inspire him with the music for the first work in which the Wagner of the immortal dramas was revealed. He says in the autobiography:

"This voyage I never shall forget as long as I live; it lasted three and a half weeks and was rich in mishaps. Thrice did we endure the most violent of storms, and once the captain found himself compelled to put into a Norwegian haven. The passage among the crags of Norway made a wonderful impression on my fancy; the legends of the Flying Dutchman, as I heard them from the seamen's mouths, were clothed for me in a distinct and individual colour, borrowed from the adventures of the ocean through which I was then passing."

But at length London was reached, and Wagner, Minna, and the great Newfoundland dog were set down at a comfortless little hotel in Old Compton Street, Soho, a dozen doors from Wardour Street, with the purlieus of Seven Dials on one side of them and Oxford and Regent Streets within a few minutes' walk.[10] His first experience in the capital of Great Britain was the loss of his magnificent Newfoundland dog, to which he was much attached. Fortunately the intelligent beast found its master. Wagner was not far away from the house in which Weber had lived when he was in London, and "to that shrine he made his first pilgrimage." He visited the Naval Hospital at Greenwich and was duly impressed by the sight of the shipping on the Thames. He went over the hospital ship Dreadnaught, one of Nelson's old fleet, and he visited Westminster Abbey, where he paid special attention to the Poets' Corner. Standing before the statue of Shakespeare, he was carried away into a long reverie on the manner in which this master had triumphed by throwing aside all the rules of the old classic writers, and Praeger sees in this one of the germs of Wagner's daring reforms. The reverie ended when the patient Minna plucked him by the sleeve and said, "Come, dear Richard, you have been standing here for twenty minutes like one of these statues and not uttering a word." And that was about the substance of Wagner's first experience in London. He says in his autobiography that nothing interested him so much as the city itself and the Houses of Parliament. He did not visit a single theatre.

He now set out for Paris by way of Boulogne, and at the latter place he tarried four weeks, because the most influential man in the operatic world of France, Giacomo Meyerbeer, was there enjoying his summer rest. It was of vital importance to Wagner to make the acquaintance of this great personage, and he did not think that the expense of a month's stay was too much to pay for the advantage. Meyerbeer, who was not averse to playing the dictator, received the poor German kindly, and after reading the libretto of "Rienzi," praised it highly. He was also flattering in his commendation of the two acts of the music which Wagner had finished. He was dubious as to the future of this young man, who had nothing on which to live while he lingered about the gates of the mighty in Paris, but he promised to do what he could for him. He said that letters of introduction were well enough in their way, but that persistence was the most valuable lever to success. With this advice he gave Wagner letters to Anténor Jolly, director of the Théâtre Renaissance, which produced musical works as well as plays; to Léon Pillet, director of the Grand Opéra; to Schlesinger, the publisher, and to Habeneck, the famous conductor.

Armed with these letters, and with that naïve trust in the future which deserted him only in his equally naïve periods of utter despondency, Wagner set out for Paris, where he arrived in September, 1839. Only twenty-six years old, he had already produced two operas, partly written a third, and conceived the germ of a fourth, which was to make him famous. His experiences in Paris were to be of the bitterest kind, but of the most vital importance to his future career. He remained in the French capital till April 7, 1842, and in the intervening time disclosed himself as an artist, although as a man he nearly starved. Out of trials and tribulations are great spirits moulded. It was necessary for Wagner to despair of pecuniary success before he found the true path to immortal fame.

[CHAPTER IV]
“THE END OF A MUSICIAN IN PARIS”

“I, poor artist, swore eternal fidelity to my fatherland.”—Wagner

On arriving in Paris Wagner took a furnished apartment in the Rue de la Tonnelerie. This was in an unfrequented quarter, but the house was said to have been occupied once by Molière. The apartment was cheap, a matter of much moment to Wagner. The young man at once started out with his letters from Meyerbeer. They not only secured him an offer for the immediate performance of one of his operas, but they also opened many doors to him and insured him a pleasant welcome. It is quite true, as Jullien[11] notes, that he owed all he ever accomplished in Paris to Meyerbeer and the men to whom he had Meyerbeer's letters. In the beginning everything was most promising. The director of the Renaissance agreed to accept "Das Liebesverbot," and Dumersan, a maker of vaudevilles, was set to work translating it. Schlesinger, the publisher, induced Habeneck, the conductor of the Conservatoire concerts, to promise to try a new overture, which Wagner had just completed. This was the work afterward known as "Eine Faust Ouvertüre." Wagner, delighted with his prospects, moved to No. 25, Rue du Helder, in the "heart of elegant and artistic Paris."

But suddenly the horizon became overclouded. The Conservatory orchestra did, indeed, try the overture, and Schlesinger inserted in his paper, the Gazette Musicale, a paragraph saying, "An overture by a young German composer of very remarkable talent, M. Wagner, has just been rehearsed by the orchestra of the Conservatoire, and has won unanimous applause. We hope to hear it immediately and we will render an account of it." As a matter of fact, the Conservatory orchestra had not been able to make head or tail of the overture, and the Théâtre de la Renaissance, instead of producing the "Liebesverbot," suddenly failed and the manager closed its doors. Quite disheartened by these reverses Wagner laid aside the "Faust" music, which he had intended to make the first movement of a "Faust" symphony. In 1855, when he was living at Zurich, he altered this familiar and admired overture to its present form.

Adolphe Jullien in his life of Wagner says that "If we have only an overture instead of a complete score of 'Faust,' we are indebted for this loss to the gold-laced musicians of the Conservatoire in 1840." Jullien appears to have supposed that Wagner contemplated an opera, but this is certainly an error. On Jan. 1, 1855, Franz Liszt wrote to Wagner and told of the completion of his "Faust" symphony. In his reply to this letter Wagner said:

"It is an absurd coincidence that just at this time I have been taken with a desire to remodel my old 'Faust' overture. I have made an entirely new score, have rewritten the instrumentation throughout, have made many changes, and have given more expansion and importance to the middle portion (second motive). I shall give it in a few days at a concert here under the title of 'A Faust Overture.' The motto will be:

But I shall not publish it in any case."

In December of the same year, nevertheless, he wrote to Liszt confessing that the fiasco of the work was "a purifying and wholesome punishment" for having published it in spite of his better judgment.

Another failure of the unfortunate Paris period was in connection with a grand entertainment which Parisians were organising in aid of the Poles. The entertainment was to consist of the performance of an opera, on the subject of the Duc de Guise, the libretto written by "a noble amateur and set to music by the young Flotow." Wagner took the score of his overture, "Polonia," to M. Duvinage, the director of the orchestra, but this gentleman had no time to examine it. It may as well be recorded here that this overture was lost for forty years, and after passing through various hands came to rest in 1881 in the possession of M. Pasdeloup, the famous Parisian conductor, from whom Wagner recovered it. He had it played in that year to celebrate his wife's birthday.

Wagner was now in dire distress. He had expended all his resources, and he could not pay for the furniture of his apartment, which he had bought on credit. Schlesinger came to his aid once more, and took from him several articles for the Gazette Musicale. The first of these, "On German Music," appeared on July 12 and 26, 1840. A translation of it will be found in Vol. VII. of W. Ashton Ellis's edition of Wagner's prose works. Schlesinger had also at this time bought the score of Donizetti's "La Favorita," and Wagner was set to work making a piano arrangement of the music. Through the help of M. Dumersan, who had begun the abandoned translation of "Das Liebesverbot" into French, he obtained a commission to write music to a vaudeville, entitled "La Déscente de la Courtille," which Dumersan and Dupeuty had written. Gasparini[13] says that the bouffe singers of that time were incapable of singing anything more difficult than the music of "La Belle Hélène" and they quickly decided that the score "of the young German was quite impossible of execution." Gasparini also notes that there was one chanson, "Allons à la Courtille," which had "its hour of celebrity." M. Jullien is probably right in saying that this song was not the work of Wagner, and Mr. Edward Dannreuther in his excellent article in Grove's "Dictionary of Music" says that it has not been traced. He next endeavoured to earn a few francs by writing songs. He made a setting of a translation of Heinrich Heine's "Two Grenadiers," but it was not so good as that made by Schumann in the previous year, and singers did not take to it kindly. He composed also at this time "L'Attente" by Victor Hugo, "Mignonne" by Ronsard, and "Dors, mon enfant." Much as we like these songs now, at the time of their composition Wagner could not get them sung or published. "Mignonne" was printed in the Gazette Musicale, and with two others was afterward reprinted in Lewald's Europa. Wagner wrote the editor a letter begging that he might be paid for them at once. They brought him in from $2 to $3.75 each.

It was in the midst of these trials that Wagner wrote his famous story entitled "A Pilgrimage to Beethoven," which attracted the attention of Hector Berlioz. In a review of a concert organised by the Gazette Musicale the distinguished Frenchman spoke of the articles in that paper, and said: "For a long time to come will be read one by M. Wagner, entitled 'A Pilgrimage to Beethoven.'" As M. Jullien says, "Little did Berlioz know how truly he spoke." In the intervals of his labours at breadwinning Wagner worked at his "Rienzi." But he sank deeper and deeper into the mire of poverty. His few friends, Laube, Heine, and Schlesinger, could do little to cheer him, though the last named furnished him with the means of life. Berlioz, whom he had met, was not sympathetic to him, though he always cherished a high regard for the Frenchman's talent.

Schlesinger again came to the rescue and decided to produce at one of the Gazette Musicale concerts a composition by Wagner. The "Columbus" overture was accordingly thus performed on Feb. 4, 1841. Schumann made a note of the performance in his paper, and Wagner, encouraged by this remembrance of him in Germany, sent the score to London to Jullien. But the manuscript, postage unpaid, came home to its maker, and he was too poor to take it from the postman. Accordingly that official put it back into his bag and walked off with it. And that was the last that was seen of this overture. Wagner's cup of misery seemed now to be brimming over. He abandoned all hope of success in the volatile French capital. He fled from his accustomed haunts, shunned the society of musicians, all mercenary and insincere as they seemed, and sought that of scholars and literary men, who at least had artistic ideals. He gave up all hope of having "Rienzi" produced at the Grand Opéra, and turned his weary eyes toward Dresden. There was an opera with an inspiring history; a theatre with a long established routine; and a company which included such artists as Tichatschek and Schroeder-Devrient.

Meyerbeer was master of the operatic world in Paris, and Wagner, who found him amiable as a man, could not sympathise with the blatant theatricalism of his "Les Huguenots" and "Robert le Diable." Halévy, he felt, had suffered his pristine enthusiasm to fade before the easy temptation of monetary success. Auber, whom he had once loved for his "Muette," he now despised for his unblushing search after popular approval. Only Berlioz pleased him, and he not fully. "He differs by the whole breadth of heaven," he says in the autobiography, "from his Parisian colleagues, for he makes no music for gold. But he cannot write for the sake of purest art; he lacks all sense of beauty. He stands completely isolated upon his own position; by his side he has nothing but a troupe of devotees, who, shallow, and without the smallest spark of judgment, greet in him the creator of a brand new musical system and completely turn his head;—the rest of the world avoids him as a madman." In Paris he met Liszt, who was afterward his best friend, but at first was not pleasing to him. He heard him play a fantasia on airs from "Robert le Diable" at a concert in honour of Beethoven, and his sincere German heart was outraged at such desecration. He felt that the virtuoso was dependent on the public fancy and shallowness, and he compared his own independence with this state in an article entitled "Du Métier de Virtuose et de l'Indépendence des Compositeurs: Fantasie Esthétique d'un Musicien," which he published in the Gazette Musicale of Oct. 18, 1840.

On Nov. 19 of the same year the score of "Rienzi" was completed, and on Dec. 4 he sent it to Von Lüttichau, the director of the opera at Dresden, accompanied by two letters, one to the director himself and the other to Friedrich August II, King of Saxony. Neither of these letters seems to have effected anything, and Wagner then applied to Meyerbeer, who on returning to Paris in the summer of 1840 had found his young friend in dire distress. Meyerbeer wrote to the intendant, Von Lüttichau. "Herr Richard Wagner of Leipsic," he said, "is a young composer who has not only a thorough musical education, but who possesses much imagination, as well as general literary culture, and whose predicament certainly merits in every way sympathy in his native land." Three months after the writing of this letter Wagner received word that his opera had been accepted at Dresden, but it was sixteen months later when it was produced. Although he knew that in Fischer, the chorusmaster, Reissiger, the conductor, and Tichatschek, the tenor, who saw golden opportunities in the title rôle, he had friends at court, yet he suffered intense anxiety during the period between the acceptance and the production of the work. The correspondence with Fischer and Heine well shows the extent of this.[14]

Meanwhile Meyerbeer, wishing to do something to give immediate help to the unfortunate young man, placed him in communication with Léon Pillet, the director of the Grand Opéra. "I had already," says Wagner in the autobiography, "provided myself for this emergency with an outline plot. The 'Flying Dutchman,' whose acquaintance I had made upon the ocean, had never ceased to fascinate my phantasy; I had also made the acquaintance of H. Heine's remarkable version of this legend in a number of his 'Salon'; and it was especially his treatment of the redemption of this Ahasuerus of the seas—borrowed from a Dutch play under the same title—that placed within my hands all the material for turning the legend into an opera subject." Wagner rushed to Pillet with this sketch for the book of the "Flying Dutchman," and the suggestion that a French text-book be prepared for him to set to music.

Pillet accepted the sketch and there was much talk about the choice of a person to make a suitable French arrangement. Suddenly Meyerbeer left Paris again, and no sooner was his back turned than Pillet told the young German that he liked "Le Vaisseau-Fantôme" so well that he would be glad to sell it to a composer to whom he had long ago promised a libretto. Wagner naturally declined to accede to such a proposition and asked for the return of his manuscript. But Pillet was unwilling to part with it. Wagner left the manuscript in his hands, hoping that Meyerbeer would return and straighten out the affair. Pursued by creditors and harassed by want, he now left Paris and went to reside in the suburb of Meudon. Here he heard by chance that his sketches for "Der Fliegende Holländer" had been placed in the hands of M. Paul Foucher for arrangement, and that he was in a fair way to be cheated out of his book. So in the end he accepted $100 for it, and was thankful to get that.

"Le Vaisseau-Fantôme," libretto by Foucher and Revoil, music by Pierre Louis Phillipe Dietsch, chorusmaster and afterward conductor at the opera, was produced Nov. 9, 1842. It was a distinguished failure and was speedily consigned to oblivion. Meanwhile Wagner, who was not forbidden by the terms of his agreement with Pillet to write a German book of his own after his sketches, sat down to pen the text of "Der Fliegende Holländer," which still lives. In seven weeks he had written the whole work except the overture, and then his $100 were gone, and he had to revert to hack work to earn bread. He returned to Paris and lived most humbly at No. 10 Rue Jacob, where he made piano scores of Halévy's "Guitarréro" and "La Reine de Chypre."

It was at this time, too, in the beginning of the year 1841, that he wrote his pathetic sketch, "The End of a Musician in Paris," in which he delineated his own hopes and disappointments, and made the poor man die with the words, "I believe in God, Mozart, and Beethoven." When the score of the "Dutchman" was completed, he hastened to send it to his fatherland, but from Munich and Leipsic came the answer that it was not suitable to Germany. "Fool that I was!" he says; "I had fancied it was fitted for Germany alone, since it is struck on chords that can only vibrate in the German breast." Once more he turned for help to the musical dictator, Meyerbeer, who was in Berlin. He sent the new work to him with a request that he get it taken up by the opera in that city. The opera was accepted speedily, but there was no prospect of immediate production. Nor did Wagner see any prospects of any kind, except starvation, in Paris.

All through the winter of 1841-42 he hoarded his money in the hope of going to Germany for the production of his "Rienzi." In the same winter began the voluminous correspondence with his Dresden friends, Wilhelm Fischer and Ferdinand Heine. The former was addressed ceremoniously in the first letters as a new acquaintance. The latter was an old friend of the Wagner family. In his letters to these two men the poet-composer poured out the tortured anxiety of his soul over the promised production of "Rienzi." He gave invaluable suggestions as to the cast and the performance. He besought first one and then the other of the friends to let him know how and when the work would at length be given. He wrote to the artists, Tichatschek and Schroeder-Devrient. They paid no attention to him. Who was he, this unknown young composer, to trouble the darlings of the public? He grovelled before them and they spurned him. Reissiger's "Adèle de Foix" must be given before "Rienzi," for Reissiger was the conductor at Dresden. Then came Halévy's "Guitarréro," which Wagner knew well indeed. And finally when "Rienzi" seemed likely to get a hearing, Mme. Schroeder-Devrient decided that she needed a revival of Gluck's "Armida." Poor Wagner! He wrote of Schroeder-Devrient to Heine:

"I believe I have already written her a dozen letters: that she has not sent me a single word in reply does not surprise me very much, because I know how some people detest letter-writing; but that she has never sent me indirectly a word or a hint disquiets me greatly. Great Heavens! so very much depends upon her; it would be truly humane on her part if she would only send me this message—perhaps by her chambermaid—'Calm yourself! I am interested in your cause!'"

At length patience became impossible. He was eager to be on the spot and to exert his personal influence. Furthermore he wished his wife to take the baths at Teplitz. So on April 7, 1842, he was able to turn his face from Paris, the scene of so much achievement, so much disappointment, and move toward his native land. "For the first time," he says at the end of the autobiographic sketch, "I saw the Rhine. With hot tears in my eyes, I, poor artist, swore eternal fidelity to my German fatherland." But a little later the poor artist's name was on every tongue, in every print; and the great Wagner war broke over Germany. For genius always arouses opposition, and there are few who can follow the seven league strides of a creative mind.

[CHAPTER V]
BEGINNING OF FAME AND HOSTILITY

“Before the world of modern art I now could hope no more for life.”—Wagner

The excursion to Teplitz in the early summer of 1842 for his wife's health was of great importance in the development of Richard Wagner, for it was there and then that he completed the outline of the book of "Tannhäuser." When he had finished "Der Fliegende Holländer," he searched for a new subject. That he had not yet discovered in what direction his genius called him is demonstrated by the fact that he was attracted by the story of the conquest of Apulia and Sicily by Manfred, the son of the Emperor Friedrich II. He made a plan for a book to be called "Die Sarazener." In this Mme. Schroeder-Devrient was to have the rôle of a half-sister of Manfred, a prophetess, who led the Saracens to victory and secured Manfred's coronation. The plot was shown to Mme. Schroeder-Devrient some years later, but it did not please her, and the work was dropped. And now there fell into Wagner's hands a version of the "Tannhäuser" legend, and his mind went flying back to Hoffmann's "Sängerkrieg," which he had read in his youth. He started to run down the different versions of the story, and in so doing came upon the legends of "Parzival" and "Lohengrin." But it was the "Tannhäuser" legend which first absorbed him, and at once he began the plan which he completed at Teplitz.

The general rehearsals for "Rienzi" began in Dresden in July, for in spite of the anxiety of Wagner and his lack of information, the preparations for the production of his work had been going on very well. The summer past, the rehearsals were again pushed forward, and the composer found valuable allies in Tichatschek, who was enamoured of the title rôle, and Fischer, who saw the power and splendour of the glowing score. For though "Rienzi" is a work entirely opposed to the true Wagnerian methods and style, it is one of the greatest creations of the real French school, to which it strictly belongs. So on Oct. 20, 1842, the first of the Wagnerian works which still hold the stage, was produced at the Dresden opera and Wagner awoke the next morning to find himself famous. The performance was an almost startling success. Singers, orchestra, public, and critics were alike amazed and overwhelmed by the enormous breadth of style, mastery of technic, and maturity of methods shown in the work. Although the performance occupied six hours, the enthusiasm of the audience was not abated. The next morning Wagner went to the theatre to indicate the cuts which should be made in the over-long work, and was met with a storm of protests by the singers. Tichatschek declared that he would not spare a measure. "It is heavenly!" he exclaimed. A second and a third performance were given with growing receipts. At the third Reissiger resigned the conductor's bâton to the young composer, and the public went wild with approval. All the wretchedness of Paris was gone and forgotten. The star of genius was in the ascendant; the Rhine had been Wagner's Rubicon.

In subsequent performances the work was divided into two parts, the first and second acts being given on one evening, and the other three on another. It was five years, however, before the opera travelled as far as the stage of the opera at Berlin. Thence it went out into all the world. But it was the end of what may be called Wagner's first artistic period. The work was planned and executed on the conventional lines of the Meyerbeerian grand opera, and the music was a compound of French and Italian styles, with here and there a burst of the real Wagner of the future. The artistic convictions which were to develop into a complete theory of the music drama in the mind of Wagner had come to him in the composition of the "Flying Dutchman," and this work became the starting point of what is commonly called his second period, in which he produced it, together with "Tannhäuser" and "Lohengrin."

The winter at Dresden passed happily, for the young composer was enjoying the first fruits of success. Heinrich Laube, the old friend of Wagner and editor of the Journal for the Polite World, asked the composer to furnish material for an autobiographic sketch, and this Wagner wrote. This sketch will be found in the first volume of the collected prose writings of the master. It ends with the start from Paris for Dresden. The music of "Rienzi" began to be heard on the concert stage, and the name of Wagner, to be noised about as that of a man of high promise. It would have been extremely easy for him to achieve pecuniary success by writing more works on the popular lines of "Rienzi," but it was not in the man to sacrifice his artistic conscience to public favour. Already the ideas which were to make him famous in time, but which were first to throw musical Europe into a ferment of dispute, had taken firm possession of his mind. In March, 1843, August Roeckel, second music director at Dresden, and a lifelong friend of Wagner, wrote to Ferdinand Praeger in London:

"Henceforth I drop myself into a well, because I am going to speak of the man whose greatness overshadows that of all other men I have ever met, either in France or England—our friend Richard Wagner. I say advisedly, our friend, for he knows you from my description as well as I do. You cannot imagine how the daily intercourse with him develops my admiration for his genius. His earnestness in art is religious; he looks upon the drama as a pulpit from which the people should be taught, and his views on a combination of the different arts for that purpose open up an exciting theory, as new as it is ideal."

This theory of a combination in one organic whole, of all the arts tributary to the drama, each part to be as important, as essential as the other, was the theory which Wagner now began to practice, which he first attempted to illustrate in his "Flying Dutchman," and which he subsequently preached in his principal prose writings. It was the theory which met with active and obstinate opposition from those who either would not or could not climb to Wagner's artistic altitude, and who preferred to see in the opera nothing but a field for the display of pretty vocal pieces and voices trained to sing them. Wagner's theory made the music and the singing subordinate to the dramatic design, transformed them from ultimate objects into means of expression; and this was to his contemporaries a revolutionary idea for which they were not prepared.

"Der Fliegende Holländer" was produced at the Dresden opera on January 2, 1843, with Mme. Schroeder-Devrient as Senta, and Wagner in the conductor's chair. The work proved to be a disappointment to the public, which had looked for another "Rienzi" with glittering processions, splendid scenery, and groupings, and imposing action coupled with brilliant music. The simple story and action of the "Dutchman," interpreted largely by music of a purely emotional character, was too serious for the Dresden audience, and at that period for audiences elsewhere. To us of the present day this work is the essence of simplicity, and much of its music seems trivially light. But to the Germans of 1843 it was a most sombre tragedy.

"My friends," Wagner says, "were dismayed at the result; they seemed anxious to obliterate this impression on them and the public by an enthusiastic resumption of 'Rienzi.' I was myself in sufficiently ill humour to remain silent and leave the 'Flying Dutchman' undefended." The critics of the day were nonplussed by the total departure from the recognised conventions of the contemporaneous stage, and they talked a deal of nonsense about the lack of melody in the work, a sort of nonsense which some old-fashioned persons have not done talking even yet. But we must remember that this new work was an artistic revelation; and the general public never likes these. It desires only to be amused in the theatre, and only after much struggling yields to the power of genius, and renders homage to true works of art. Wagner himself realised that the general public could not be looked to for support in his radical departure from the easy path of tuneful dalliance, in which it was accustomed to travel. In his "Communication to My Friends" he says:

"From Berlin, where I was entirely unknown, I received from two utter strangers, who had been attracted towards me by the impression which 'The Flying Dutchman' had produced upon them, the first complete satisfaction which I had been permitted to enjoy, with the invitation to continue in the particular direction I had marked out. From this moment I lost more and more from sight the veritable public. The opinion of a few intelligent men took the place in my mind of the opinion of the masses, which can never be wholly apprehended, although it had been the object of my labour in my first attempts, when my eyes were not yet open to the light."

On May 22 the opera was given at Riga, and on June 5 at Cassel under direction of the famous composer, violinist, and conductor, Ludwig Spohr. The poem had been submitted to him and he had spoken of it as a little masterpiece. He had sent for the music, and at once decided to produce the work. It seems strange that Spohr, a composer of tendencies so different from Wagner's and so old a man (he was sixty-nine), should have been one of the first to perceive the power of the new genius. But in a letter to his friend Lüders he wrote:

"This work, though it comes near the boundary of the new romantic school à la Berlioz, and is giving me unheard-of trouble with its immense difficulties, yet interests me in the highest degree since it is obviously the product of pure inspiration, and does not, like so much of our modern operatic music, betray in every bar the striving to make a sensation or to please. There is much creative imagination in it, its invention is thoroughly noble, and it is well written for the voices, while the orchestral part, though enormously difficult, and somewhat overladen, is rich in new effects and will certainly, in our large theatre, be perfectly clear and intelligible."[15]

The completeness of the popular failure of the "Flying Dutchman" may be estimated from the fact that after the first performances in Dresden it disappeared from the répertoire of that opera for twenty years. It was produced in Berlin in 1844, and it was ten years after that when it was heard again anywhere. Wagner himself did not realise either the fulness or the significance of the failure of this work. He had only begun to experiment with his reformatory ideas, and that the public was not ready to accept them with acclaim could not have amazed him, though it doubtless brought him from the rosy heights of sanguinity down to the shadier levels of dull fact. To awaken from a hopeful dream, however illusive, is painful; and Wagner was momentarily shocked and hurt. But as he had not yet grasped all the details of his own theories, so he failed to perceive the utterness of the public inability to comprehend his dawning purposes. It was not till after the production of his "Tannhäuser," which some of his most ardent admirers still regard as poetically his noblest tragedy, that he realised the solitariness of his genius, the shallowness of a public trained up to be lightly pleased.

Meanwhile he was appointed to a very important professional post. The deaths of Kapellmeister Morlacchi in 1841 and "Musik-director" Rastrelli in 1842 had made two vacancies in the Dresden Theatre. Wagner was one of those who applied for the secondary position at a salary of 1200 thalers (about $900) a year. Von Lüttichau, the Intendant (manager), excited by the success of "Rienzi," thought he had found a rare jewel, and supported Wagner, with the result that the composer was appointed Hofkapellmeister at 1500 thalers (about $1125). The position of Hofkapellmeister also carried with it life incumbency, and a pension on retirement. On January 10, 1843, he conducted Weber's "Euryanthe," this being the customary public "trial" representation. He then made an unsuccessful trip to Berlin to try to push his "Rienzi." Before the close of the month his appointment was formally made, and his first duty was to assist Hector Berlioz, who arrived in Dresden on February 1, in the rehearsals for his concerts.[16]

He served seven years as conductor at Dresden and in that time rehearsed and conducted works by Weber, Spohr, Spontini, Mendelssohn, Mozart, Beethoven, Marschner, Gluck, and others, gaining an immense amount of valuable experience. The arrangement of Gluck's "Iphigenie in Aulis," which he made for the performance of February 22, 1847, is published and approved by critical authorities.

Concerts were given by the court orchestra, and in these he conducted the leading orchestral works, making a special study of the Beethoven symphonies. To this labour he applied all the results of his early studies of Beethoven, and his own ideas about conducting, together with some thoughts formed in listening to the Conservatoire concerts in Paris. The results of these studies and experiences he subsequently embodied in a book called "Ueber das Dirigen." (On Conducting). Among his other duties a certain amount of attention had to be given to the music of the Hofkirche. The choir consisted of fourteen men and twelve boys, and there was a full orchestra of fifty, including trumpets and trombones. Wagner said to Mr. Edward Dannreuther, "The echoes and reverberations in the building were deafening. I wanted to relieve the hard-working members of the orchestra and female voices, and introduce true Catholic church music a cappella. As a specimen I prepared Palestrina's 'Stabat Mater,' and suggested other pieces, but my efforts failed." Wagner was as true an artist in the matter of church music as he was in that of the stage, and he returned with joy to the glorious treasure-house of Roman art; but he found his public just as unfit for that as for his new dispensations in the drama.

Wagner was made conductor of the Liedertafel, a chorus of men organised in 1839, and also of the Saengerfest of 1843. It took place in July of that year and the composer wrote for it "Das Liebesmahl der Apostel," a biblical scene. The story of this celebration of the Lord's Supper by the Apostles was this: The disciples being assembled for the feast, the Apostles arrive with the information that the penalty of death has been prescribed for teaching the Christian faith. Alarm fills every breast and the assembly prays to the Father to send them the Holy Spirit. Heavenly voices sound from above, telling the supplicants that their prayer has been granted. Then follows a convulsion of nature, caused by the descent of the Spirit, and the Apostles and Disciples go forth to preach the Gospel. A chorus of forty men represented the Disciples, and the heavenly voices were consigned to an invisible choir singing in the dome of the building. This bit of stage management, repeated in "Parsifal," was the only feature of the work that attracted special attention.[17] The correspondent of the Paris Gazette Musicale, Schlesinger's paper, wrote, "This last work, the conception of which is most daring, has produced an extraordinary effect, and one which it is impossible to describe. The King after the concert was over summoned the young author to him, and testified his satisfaction in the most affectionate terms." But the Gazette Musicale's Dresden correspondent trusted much to the effect of distance in magnifying the size of a popular demonstration. Wagner himself thought well of this work, and lamented in a letter to Liszt in 1852 that choral societies did not perform it. But the truth is that the most noticeable qualities of the composition are purely theatrical, showing that Wagner's genius was entirely for the stage and not for the concert platform.

Spontini, the aged composer of "La Vestale," visited Dresden when his work was produced under Wagner's direction, and was treated by the young conductor with great veneration in spite of his troublesome demands for adherence to his old manner of performing the work. Wagner also entered heart and soul into a project which the Liedertafel had long cherished, namely, to carry the remains of Weber from London to Germany and inter them in the family vault at Dresden. The Liedertafel had raised some money by concerts, and now after Wagner had overcome the opposition of both the King and the Intendant, an operatic performance was given for the aid of the plan. The receipts, added to the funds already secured and augmented by the proceeds of a benefit given in Berlin by Meyerbeer, enabled the Liedertafel to send Weber's oldest son to London for the remains. He returned in December, and on the fourteenth of that month the ceremony of reinterment took place. The funeral music was arranged by Wagner from two passages in "Euryanthe," and he delivered the funeral oration, which was pronounced a masterly effort. It may be read in his collected prose writings. Taken all in all, the work of Wagner outside of the field of operatic composition was important while he was in Dresden. He certainly amazed the Germans themselves by his puissant revelations of the possibilities of the Beethoven symphonies, and his interpretations of the works of other composers were so striking and so far out of the conventional ruts into which the easy-going kapellmeisters of the country had fallen that a coterie of bitter opponents to him arose. Among them he was known as Wagner, the iconoclast, and this deceptive appellation, applied to him because he was not satisfied with indolent mediocrity and slothful error, clung to him for many years, an empty formula which its users could not justify.

It was at this time that, smarting under the failure of his public to understand him, and half inclined to return to the easy path of popular success indicated by the triumph of "Rienzi," he showed to Mme. Schroeder-Devrient the sketch of "Manfred." She, however, was not pleased with the story and dissuaded him from attempting to develop it. That his own artistic conscience was at work, too, is shown by the words written by him in the "Communication to My Friends."

"Through the happy change in the aspect of my outward lot; through the hopes I cherished of its even still more favourable development in the future; and finally through my personal, and in a sense, intoxicating contact with a new and well-inclined surrounding, a passion for enjoyment had sprung up within me, that led my inner nature, formed among the struggles and impressions of a painful past, astray from its own peculiar path. A general instinct that urges every man to take life as he finds it now pointed me, in my particular relations as artist, to a path which, on the other hand, must soon and bitterly disgust me. This instinct could only have been appeased in life on condition of my seeking as artist to wrest myself renown and pleasure by a complete subordination of my true nature to the demands of the public taste in art. I should have had to submit myself to the mode, and to speculation on its weaknesses; and here, on this point at least, my feeling showed me clearly that, with an actual entry on that path, I must inevitably be engulfed in my own loathing. Thus the pleasures of life presented themselves to my feeling in the shape alone of what our modern world can offer to the senses; and this again appeared attainable by me as artist solely along the direction which I had already learnt to recognise as the exploitation of our public art-morass. In actual life I was at like time confronted—in the person of a woman for whom I had a sincere admiration—with the phenomenon that a longing akin to my own could only imagine itself contented with the paltriest return of trivial love; a delusion so completely threadbare that it could never really mask its nature from the inner need.

"If at last I turned impatiently away and owed the strength of my repugnance to the independence already developed in my nature both as artist and as man, so did that double revolt of man and artist inevitably take on the form of a yearning for appeasement in a higher, nobler element; an element which, in its contrast to the only pleasures that the material present reads in modern life and modern art, could but appear to me in the guise of a pure, chaste, virginal, unseizable and unapproachable ideal of love. What in fine could this love-yearning, the noblest thing my heart could feel, what other could it be than a longing for release from the present, for absorption into an element of endless love, a love denied to earth, and reachable through the gates of death alone? And what again at bottom could such a longing be but the yearning of love; aye, of a real love, seeded in the soil of fullest sentience—yet a love that could never come to fruitage on the loathsome soil of modern sentience? The above is an exact account of the mood in which I was when the unlaid ghost of 'Tannhäuser' returned again and urged me to complete his poem."

In these sentences one can easily find the mind of the Wagner who wrote "Tristan und Isolde," and this statement of the mood of the time explains why "Tannhäuser" stands more closely related to "Tristan" than any other of the master's works. Urged now by his artistic soul and dissuaded by the intuition of Mme. Schroeder-Devrient from yielding to a dangerous impulse, he turned once more to "Tannhäuser" and completed the work in April, 1844. "With this work I penned my death warrant," he says; "before the world of modern art I now could hope no more for life. This I felt; but as yet I knew it not with full distinctness:—that knowledge I was not to gain till later."

Every work that Wagner wrote was, at least in so far as it was related to his own life, epoch-making; and the birth of "Tannhäuser" marks a departure so wide that it must receive special consideration. The great Wagner war began with the production of this drama, and in it the composer's opponents first discovered those "unmusical" traits which they celebrated for half a century, till the applause of the civilised world drowned out their noise. The hint at the dissatisfaction of the man with the "paltriest return of trivial love" shows us that the inability of the good Minna to enter into the lofty aspirations of her husband and her inevitable sympathy with the false impulses urging toward swift pecuniary success had already set at work in the mind of Wagner those dangerous longings which were eventually to lead to their separation.

[CHAPTER VI]
“LOHENGRIN” AND “DIE MEISTERSINGER”

“How curious I am to hear Liszt about it.”—Wagner

When "Tannhäuser" had been completed Wagner went to Marienbad to spend the summer. While there he made the first drafts of his "Meistersinger" and "Lohengrin." He says: "As with the Athenians a merry satyr-play followed the tragedy, so, during that excursion, I suddenly conceived the idea of a comic play which might follow my minstrel's contest in the Wartburg as a significant satyr-play. This was the Mastersingers of Nuremberg with Hans Sachs at their head. Scarcely had I finished the sketch of this plot when the plan of 'Lohengrin' began to engage my attention, and left me no rest until I had worked it out in detail." Returning to Dresden he devoted himself to the preparations for the production of "Tannhäuser." For, in spite of the failure of "Der Fliegende Holländer," the Intendant had not wholly lost faith in the young man. August Roeckel, who was now always at Wagner's side, urged so eloquently the need of new scenery for this drama that painters were brought from Paris. The best singers available were placed at Wagner's disposal, and they vied with one another in studying this, to them, almost incomprehensible work. Tichatschek had to have the music of "Tannhäuser" lowered for him. Johanna Wagner, the daughter of the composer's brother Albert, was specially engaged for Elizabeth, and Schroeder-Devrient took Venus, while Mitterwurzer was the Wolfram. Wagner wrote an explanation of his poem, and placed it at the head of the libretto, which was sold at the door. On Oct. 19, 1845, the work was performed for the first time. The opening scene went for nothing. Schroeder-Devrient, who did not like the music of Venus, sang it badly, and the audience lost the entire significance of the episode. The ensuing scene went well and the popular septet at the end of the act gained the composer a recall. The march in the second act pleased, but the contest in the hall of song dragged listlessly. The evening star song was liked, but then came the true Wagner, the Wagner of the uncompromising music drama. The return of Tannhäuser and his despairing narrative were wholly lost on the audience. The public was unable to understand the aims of a man who, having a heroic tenor on the stage in a grand situation, would not write a pealing aria for him, but persisted in making him tell a story in a long declamatory recitative. The master's intent to put the dramatic situation before them was not discerned. All that was seen was that he would not write a pretty song when he might have done so. "Tannhäuser" reached its fourth performance on Nov. 2. The following day Wagner wrote to his friend Carl Galliard in Berlin, sending him a copy of the score:

"I have gained a big action with my 'Tannhäuser.' Let me give you a very short account of a few of the facts. Owing to the hoarseness of some of the singers, the second performance was played a week after the first; this was very bad, for in the long interval ignorance and erroneous and absurd views, fostered by my enemies, who exerted themselves vigorously, had full scope for swaggering about; and when the moment of the second performance at length arrived, my opera was on the point of failing; the house was not well filled; opposition! prejudice! Luckily, however, all the singers were as enthusiastic as ever; intelligence made a way for itself, and the third act, somewhat shortened, was especially successful; after the singers had been called out, there was a tumultuous cry for me. I have now formed a nucleus among the public; at the third performance there was a well-filled house and an enthusiastic reception of the work. After every act the singers and the author were tumultuously applauded; in the third act at the words, 'Heinrich, du bist erlöst,' the house resounded with an outbreak of enthusiasm. Yesterday at length the fourth performance took place before a house crammed to suffocation; after every act the singers were called out, and after them on each occasion the author; after the second act there was a regular tumult. Whenever I show myself people greet me enthusiastically. My dear Galliard, this is indeed a rare success, and under the circumstances one for which I scarcely hoped."

But in a short time Wagner realised that all the applause was for the popular numbers in his work, and for the stage pictures and ensembles. The drama as a whole had missed fire. The public did not know what Wagner designed. The ethical meaning of his play was hidden from the people. Its artistic purport was undiscerned. The public still went to the theatre to see the pretty pictures and hear the pretty tunes. Of the conception of an opera as the highest form of poetic drama they were as ignorant as they had ever been. A few years later Wagner, in recalling this, wrote in the "Communication to My Friends":

"The public had shown me plainly by its enthusiastic reception of 'Rienzi' and by the colder treatment of the 'Dutchman,' what I must offer it to win approval. Its expectations I disappointed utterly. Confused and dissatisfied it left the first performance of 'Tannhäuser.' I was overwhelmed by a feeling of complete isolation. The few friends who heartily sympathised with me were themselves so depressed by my painful position that the perception of this sympathetic ill-humour was the only friendly sign about me."

From this time it is possible to trace two features in the career of Wagner. The first was a ceaseless effort to spread by polemical writings the meaning of his doctrines, and the second was a somewhat reckless determination to abide by them, come what might. Wagner has been charged with grave neglect of the practical affairs of life. He was interminably in debt. He borrowed money right and left, and seemed to entertain an idea that the world ought to support such a genius as he while he was pursuing his vast projects. This was not exactly the vein of Wagner's thought, though his reckless methods of expression might easily justify the belief that it was. The man was aflame with the fire of his own genius. He knew what it was in him to produce, and he rebelled bitterly against the constant pressure of his daily needs to turn him aside, to force him to write pot-boilers and abandon his vast conceptions. That a man with such an artistic conscience as Wagner's could not compromise we can easily understand; and the struggle of the ensuing years began with the decision to bring the public to him, and not to descend to the flowery level on which it reposed.

Criticism of Wagner's writings at this time was of the most discouraging sort. In Dresden, for instance, the leading commentator was one Schladebach. This gentleman was, perhaps, a perfectly honest critic, but he was incompetent to discern the importance of a departure from the beaten path. He constituted himself the champion of classicism, for which poor conventionality is so often and so easily mistaken. When a number of famous masters have laid down the plan of opera, it is extremely confusing to a poor critic to have a stranger appear and propose a wholly different method of treating the form. Schladebach was incapable of understanding the theories and aims of Wagner; so he praised whatever was good according to the old models, and condemned what departed from them. He was the correspondent of the leading papers of many German cities, and consequently the belief was spread abroad that, while this man Wagner had some talent, he was unpractical and hopelessly eccentric. The managers paid no attention to him, in many cases they did not even look at the scores which he sent them.

Robert Schumann, who went to live in Dresden in the fall of 1844, wrote to Dorn in 1846, "I wish you could see 'Tannhäuser'; it contains deeper, more original, and altogether an hundredfold better things than his previous operas—at the same time a good deal that is musically trivial. On the whole, Wagner may become of great importance and significance to the stage, and I am sure he is possessed of the needful courage." Unfortunately the pressure of the general opinion of the time proved to be too strong even for Schumann, and a few years later he wrote that Wagner was "not a good musician." Spohr, who produced "Tannhäuser" in 1853, wrote, "The opera contains much that is new and beautiful, also several ugly attacks on one's ears." In another place he complains of the "absence of definite rhythm and the frequent lack of rounded periods." In none of the contemporaneous criticism, except that written by Wagner's intimates, can one find anything to show that the writers had discerned the artistic purpose of the composer. It is not strange that he felt that he stood alone.

Nor is it, on the whole, strange that he was misunderstood. As for the critics, they had formed their standards of opera on the masterpieces of Meyerbeer, Spontini, and Rossini. Even in Mozart they were unable to find justification for Wagner's ideas, for it was his novelty in form that confused them. The public had long placed opera in the category of "amusements." It went to the opera house to hear arias, duos, quartets, sung by great singers, while the story, told chiefly in recitatives, was regarded merely as an excuse for the presentation of certain poetic points of emotion to be set to music. When Wagner came, demanding that the music should be only one means of expression of the whole emotional content of a consistent drama, and that it should not be simply a string of pretty tunes, we can easily understand that he was far beyond the public of his day, and we can picture to ourselves the unhappy Intendant, asking him why it was necessary to be so distressing, and why Tannhäuser could not marry Elizabeth.

In the year 1847 Wagner's musical activity was confined almost wholly to work upon his "Lohengrin." He lived in retirement as much as possible, and gave himself up to the realisation of those artistic projects with which he felt that his entire surroundings were unsympathetic. In the winter of 1845 he had conceived and noted the principal themes. In the fall of 1846 he lived in a villa at Grosgraufen, near Pilnitz, and there he began the music. In the summer of 1847 he secluded himself wholly, and on August 28 he finished the introduction, which for more than half a century has thrilled hearers all over the world. The scoring of the entire opera was completed in the early spring. While Wagner must have realised the artistic value of this new work, he must also have seen how much further he had removed himself from the possibility of public comprehension than he had in his "Tannhäuser." He even doubted the practicability of opera as an art form. The Intendant of the Dresden opera did not feel any sympathy with the composer's experimental mood, and only the finale of the third act of "Lohengrin," performed on September 22, 1848, at the anniversary celebration of the orchestra, was heard in Dresden.

Meanwhile although "Tannhäuser" had been refused a hearing at Berlin, preparations had been made for the production of "Rienzi," and the birthday of the King of Prussia, Oct. 5, 1847, had been chosen as the date for the performance. Wagner went to Berlin to superintend the rehearsals. There he found that anti-Wagnerism was in full bloom. The newspapers began the attack before the work was made known, and every possible rumour that envy and jealousy could invent found ready acceptance. The fate of "Rienzi" was sealed in advance. The manager of the opera discovered that the text of the work breathed a revolutionary spirit quite out of keeping with the temper of a royal fête, and accordingly the production was postponed till Oct. 26. On that evening "Rienzi" was given, but the King was not present, the court did not attend, and Meyerbeer, who was the general director of music, was suddenly called out of town. There was an audience of good size and the applause was of a liberal character; but there was no hope of permanent success in Berlin without the smiles of royalty and the favourable comment of the press. So Wagner saw his dreams of pecuniary aid from this early work fade away, and leave him to struggle with the constantly growing problem of how to live.

The eventful year 1848 was now at hand, a year which was big with incidents in the personal and artistic life of Wagner. It was in this year that the political troubles which harassed the kingdom of Saxony, and Germany in general, made themselves felt in the opera house and afterward in the career of the composer. The work of the opera house was affected by the general unrest. Nothing serious was undertaken. The list of the season was made up chiefly of works of the calibre of Flotow's "Martha," then in the height of its popularity. The orchestra gave three subscription concerts, and at one of these Wagner conducted Bach's eight-part motet, "Singt dem Herrn ein neues Lied." In March he finished the instrumentation of "Lohengrin" and then his mind began to busy itself with a new subject. The first which attracted him was "Jesus of Nazareth." The impulse which led him to the contemplation of this subject was so plainly identical with that which afterward led to the creation of "Parsifal" that it is worth while to note how far he went in its embodiment. He collected a large quantity of material for this projected work, and published it afterward in a volume of a hundred pages.[18]

At this period, too, he seriously contemplated the employment of the story of Barbarossa, or Friedrich Rothbart, as material for a lyric drama. His study of this subject was of inestimable value to him in shaping clearly in his mind the conviction that a mythical subject was more suitable than one historical for the purpose of musical treatment. He discovered that he could not give to the splendid personality of Barbarossa the necessary historical background without overloading his opera with a host of minor details too inflexible for musical treatment. On the other hand to endeavour to sacrifice historical accuracy to dramatic requirements would materially change the true character of his subject. He became convinced that only a mythical subject, in which elementary world-thoughts and emotions were typified, would admit of free musical treatment. His serious study of this whole matter resulted in an essay entitled, "Die Wibelungen.—Weltgeschichte aus der Sage" ("The Wibelungs: world-history from the Saga"). The essay treats of the history of the world according to tradition, showing the agreement of history and mythology in certain elementary facts. It was written in 1848 and was published at Leipsic in 1850. It will be found in Vol. VII. of Mr. Ellis's translation of the prose works.

[CHAPTER VII]
“ART AND REVOLUTION”

“Behold Mercury, and his docile handmaid, Modern Art!”—Wagner

The period of Wagner's life which we have now reached was one of much complication and of important results. With the decision to abandon the subject of Barbarossa he made another, namely that the story of the Nibelungen Lied and its original material as found in the Volsunga Saga would provide excellent material for a music drama. His conception was first formulated in an article entitled "The Nibelung Myth as Sketch for a Drama" (Ellis's translation, Vol. VII.). This was followed by the first form of the text of the drama, "Siegfried's Tod," a translation of which will be found in Mr. Ellis's eighth volume. Wagner's first thought was to tell the entire story of the death of Siegfried and the causes leading to it in one opera, but he was not long in discovering that this was impossible. In June, 1849, he wrote to Franz Liszt, with whom he had begun a correspondence[19] in 1841 (though it did not become continuous till 1845) in these words: "Meanwhile I shall employ my time in setting to music my latest German drama, 'The Death of Siegfried.' Within half a year I shall send you the opera completed." In 1851 in a long letter to Liszt he explained how he had found it impossible to condense the whole story into one drama, and afterward even into two, and thus how the work had stretched itself into four separate dramas.

At the time of the writing of the original form of the book Wagner also conceived some of the germs of the music, and in this, too, lay the seed of a new and wonderful development of his genius. His "Lohengrin" marked a wide departure from the style of his "Tannhäuser," but in the dramas based on the Siegfried legend he went much further. He felt in the beginning that he would be forced to do so, and in the fall of 1850 he wrote to Liszt: "Between the musical execution of my 'Lohengrin' and that of my 'Siegfried' there lies for me a stormy, but I feel convinced, a fruitful world." The correspondence between Wagner and Liszt had grown into warmth when the latter undertook the preparation of "Tannhäuser" for production at Weimar, where he was the ruling power in music. No one who desires to be intimately acquainted with the life of Wagner should omit reading this correspondence, which throws more light on the artistic and personal character of the two men than anything else in existence. It is highly creditable to Liszt that he early recognised the full force of the genius of Wagner and bowed to him as a superior. On the other hand Wagner, who was hopelessly improvident and always in the depths of monetary difficulties, came to lean on Liszt as a friend in all needs.

It is possible that through the influence of Liszt Wagner might have gained wide recognition throughout Germany much sooner than he did, but his own sympathy with the revolutionary ideas of the time led him into direct conflict with authority in Saxony and drove him into exile. The story of Wagner's connection with the revolutionary movements of 1848 and 1849 has had several versions, and it has been the subject of acrid dispute between Wagner's devotees and those who are only candid friends. The story of the Saxon uprising need not be repeated here in detail. Suffice it to say that the impetus of the French revolution of 1848 moved the people of Saxony to demand of their king a constitution, a free press, trial by jury, national armies, and representation. The king refused to accede to the demands. A second time through a deputation Leipsic people demanded what they regarded as their rights and threatened to attack Dresden, if these were not conceded. The king adopted conciliatory measures, which served to allay the excitement for a time, but the people soon saw that under the surface oppression was gaining headway.

Wagner and his friend and assistant, August Roeckel, the latter an enthusiastic republican, became members of a society known as the "Fatherland Union," an organisation devoted to the furtherance of reform measures, but not in favour of direct disloyalty to the king. Before this society on June 16 Wagner read a paper entitled "What is the Relation of our Efforts to the Monarchy?" Wagner had previously drawn up for the government a plan for the reorganisation of the Dresden Theatre. In that paper he proposed that the changes in the existing arrangements be made so that the theatre would be brought into closer relations with the higher artistic life of the people. It was at this period, too, that he wrote "Art and Revolution," in which he still further demonstrated that he saw a connection between political and artistic reform, or rather that he believed the latter impossible under the restrictions of extant governmental control. He aimed at a sort of republican representation in art, a plan by which the literary and artistic elements of the community might have voices in the direction of the theatre. He saw no way of bringing this about except by a change in the nature of the government.

Therefore in this paper read before the Vaterlandsverein he demanded general suffrage, abolition of the standing army and the aristocracy, and the conversion of Saxony into a republic. His loyalty to the king was shown by his proposal that he should himself proclaim the republic and remain in office at its head. This speech was published and it caused a good deal of unfavourable comment. Yet it was not taken very seriously, for Wagner was warned that a Court Conductor should not indulge in such talk; he wrote a long letter of extenuation to Lüttichau, the Intendant; asked for a brief leave of absence, and obtained it. And that would have been the end of the matter in all probability, had not open insurrection broken out.

It was in regard to the acts of Wagner in the days of turmoil in May, 1849, that the acrid dispute before mentioned raged in 1892. This dispute was caused chiefly by the statements of Ferdinand Praeger in "Wagner as I Knew Him." Among other things Praeger said, "During the first few of his eleven years of exile his talk was incessantly about the outbreak, and the active aid he rendered at the time, and of his services to the cause by speech and by pen prior to the 1849 May days; and yet in after life, in his talk with me, who held documentary evidence, under his own hand, of his participation, he in petulant tones sought either to minimise the part he played or to explain it away altogether. This change of front I first noticed about 1864 at Munich." With this as his text Praeger set out to show that Wagner was a red-handed revolutionary, and that he fought on the barricades in the streets of Dresden.

It was my fortune to read these assertions of Praeger's before they were published. The manuscript of his book was placed in my hands by his publishers in 1892 to be prepared for the press. The author was dead and no changes could be made in his work. It seemed to me at the time that Praeger had written incautiously of this whole matter, and that at any rate he might fairly have represented Wagner as desirous in after years to bury the memories of an unwise exhibition of his republican tendencies. But of Praeger's honesty I never had a doubt, nor had I any reason to suppose that he was not well informed (through his intimate friendship with Roeckel) of Wagner's actions in the May days of 1849. Pohl, Glasenapp, and Tappert had said but little in regard to the matter, and, as I was not editing, but merely supervising the printing of the book, it would not have been open to me to write so much as a foot-note of warning to the reader to take Praeger's statements with a grain of salt, even if I had been fully informed of the real facts in the case.

But Wagner was not without a champion. Mr. W. Ashton Ellis, editor of "The Meister," and translator of the prose works, published in 1892 a complete answer to Praeger under the title of "1849: a Vindication." In this he showed that Praeger had formed a theory as to Wagner's part in the revolution and had wrested the facts to make them appear as evidence. He also proved that some of the acts attributed to Wagner were those of a young journeyman baker of the same name. The real facts of the case, as I have sifted them from the conflicting testimony, appear to be these:

Wagner's mind was filled with a conviction that freedom and the honesty of art went hand in hand. His reformatory ideas embraced not only the stage, but its relations to governmental control, through which its artistic character must be touched and guided. The stage could never be brought to represent the spirit of the people till the government was. All around him he saw the relics of feudalism, and the innate hostility of these to that freedom of art and public to which he looked forward made him a republican at heart. His paper read before the Fatherland Union was, as we have seen, a plea for free government and representation by the people, but it was filled with a spirit of loyalty to the reigning king.

When the revolutionary movement took shape Wagner, as Mr. Ellis notes, did not hesitate between the dictates of his conscience and the preservation of court favour. He became, as he afterward confessed in a letter to Liszt, openly active in the movement. But the stories of his firing a musket from the barricades and setting fire to public buildings are pure fabrications. Praeger's narrative of his revolutionary activity is misleading, and Mr. Ellis's pamphlet has quite demolished it. Wagner assisted in getting men and stores into Dresden, and he probably carried a musket while engaged in this work. At the Town Hall he publicly embraced one of the revolutionary leaders after the latter had made a speech. On May 1, 1849, the king dissolved the Saxon diet, and the people went to arms. The insurgents were victorious in the beginning, but Prussian troops arrived 36 hours later, and the revolutionaries were put to flight. Wagner escaped from Dresden and hurried to Weimar, where he took refuge under the wing of Liszt, then actively preparing "Tannhäuser" for performance.

Mr. Praeger says: "Future biographers can no longer ignobly treat the patriotism of Wagner by striving to whitewash or gloss over the part he played during these sad days." It is the hope of the present biographer that he will not be accused of any attempt to conceal the truth in regard to this matter, especially as he has not been able to discover in it anything discreditable to Wagner. His action was injudicious, it was impulsive, it was shortsighted; but it was honest. If in after years Wagner saw that the regeneration of the theatre might be accomplished without the overthrow of extant forms of government, and if at the same time he wished ardently to return to his native land, it was not at all surprising that he expressed sorrow for his actions. It was quite natural indeed that in April, 1856, he wrote to Liszt:

"In regard to that riot and its sequels, I am willing to confess that I now consider myself to have been in the wrong at that time, and carried away by my passions, although I am conscious of not having committed any crime that would properly come before the courts, so that it would be difficult for me to confess to any such."

Disheartened as Wagner was at the inartistic conditions surrounding the theatre at Dresden, it was not astonishing that he rejoiced in the excuse for flight, and that he hastened to Weimar with a jubilant spirit. That Liszt was glad to receive him thus unexpectedly goes without saying. It was this meeting which perfected the understanding between these two remarkable men, and which cemented indissolubly the friendship hitherto dependent on their letters for its support. They came to know one another intimately, and from that time onward Liszt was the main prop of Wagner. As Mr. Finck well summarises it in his life of Wagner: "A few letters had passed between the two, and they had met several times, but it was not until this occasion that their hearts were really opened towards each other, and the beginning was made of a friendship unequalled in cordiality and importance in the history of art, and without the existence of which the world would in all probability have never seen the better half of Wagner's music dramas. It was Liszt who helped him with funds when he would otherwise have been compelled to stop composing and earn his bread like the commonest day labourer; Liszt who sustained him with his approval when all the critical world was against him; Liszt who brought out his operas when all other conductors ignored them; Liszt who wrote letters, private and journalistic, about his friend's works and aims, besides three long and enthusiastic essays on 'Tannhäuser,' 'Lohengrin,' and the 'Dutchman,' which were printed in German and French, and with the Weimar performances of these operas, gave the first impulse to 'the Wagner movement.'"

Of the greatest importance to Wagner was Liszt's understanding of his artistic aims. Wagner said that when he saw Liszt conduct a rehearsal of "Tannhäuser," he recognised a second self in the achievement. Discouraged as he had been on leaving Dresden, his spirits now rose again, and he would undoubtedly have settled down in Weimar to pursue his artistic labours under the protection of Liszt, had not news come that he was wanted by the police. A warrant was issued for him as a politically dangerous person and his description was published. As soon as this news was received, Wagner, acting on Liszt's advice, fled.

So hasty was his departure that, as we learn from a letter of Liszt to Carl Reinecke, he left Weimar on the very day of a performance of "Tannhäuser," which he, therefore, did not witness. This was in the latter part of May. He went directly to Zurich, where he remained a few days and obtained a passport for France. He wrote from Zurich to a Weimar friend, O.L.B. Wolff, that Liszt would soon receive a bundle of scores from Minna, his wife.

"The score of my 'Lohengrin,'" he wrote, "I beg him to examine leisurely. It is my latest, ripest work. No artist has seen it yet, and of none have I therefore been able to ascertain what impression it may produce. Now I am anxious to hear what Liszt has to say about it."

From this same letter we learn that Minna had been left in the city from which Wagner had fled. He says:

"That wonderful man must also look after my poor wife. I am particularly anxious to get her out of Saxony, and especially out of that d——d Dresden."

It is necessary only to say that while Liszt at first had doubts of the public success of "Lohengrin," owing to what he called its "superideal character," he immediately recognised its artistic greatness, and was the first to bring it before the public.

In Zurich Wagner contemplated the stern necessity of doing something toward the support of himself and wife, and he saw in the production of an opera in Paris his only hope. Accordingly he set out for the French capital. Liszt had already written to Belloni, an influential person in the musical circles of Paris:

"In the first place, we want to create a success for a grand, heroic, enchanting musical work, the score of which was completed a year ago. Perhaps this could be done in London. Chorley, for instance, might be very helpful to him in this undertaking. If Wagner next winter could go to Paris backed up by this success, the doors of the Opéra would stand open to him, no matter with what he might knock."

Wagner had a consultation with Belloni in Paris, and was convinced that nothing could be done with his extant works. He decided that he must spend a year and a half in the preparation of a new work, and for that purpose he must live in seclusion with his wife. He tells Liszt in a long letter that he has decided on Zurich, and begs Liszt to make arrangements for an income for him from his works so that he can live to write more. He says that he is fit for nothing but to write operas; he must create some genuine art work or perish. He has arranged to send from Zurich to Belloni a sketch of a work for Paris, and Belloni is to get a French version made. Meanwhile Wagner will be working on the "Death of Siegfried." And so, after this brief and futile visit to Paris in June, 1849, we find him back at Zurich early in July. And now it became his fixed idea to get his wife out of Dresden and settled down in some sort of a home in Zurich. But he had no means. Once more, then, he appealed to the unfailing friend Liszt. He tells the great pianist that he has no further resources, and says:

"You, therefore, I implore by all that is dear to you to raise and collect as much as you possibly can, and send it, not to me, but to my wife, so that she may have enough to get away and join me with the assurance of being able to live with me free from care for some time at least. Dearest friend, you care for my welfare, my soul, my art. Once more restore to me my art! I do not cling to a home, but I cling to this poor, good, faithful woman, to whom as yet I have caused nothing but grief, who is of a careful, serious disposition, without enthusiasm, and who feels herself chained forever to such a reckless devil as myself."

These words go far toward revealing the true nature of the relations of Wagner and Minna. They also do credit to his justice, but at the same time show how completely unsettled he was at this period. Liszt hastened to reply in a letter beginning: "In answer to your letter I have remitted one hundred thalers to your wife at Dresden. This sum has been handed to me by an admirer of 'Tannhäuser,' whom you do not know and who has especially asked me not to name him to you."[20]

In due time Minna arrived in Zurich only to begin to combat her husband's artistic inclinations. He was eager to write "The Death of Siegfried." She urged him to abandon his unprofitable ideals, and to write for Paris the sort of opera that Paris would like. For Minna was ashamed of living on the charity of friends, and for that we cannot blame her. Nor can we even yet bring ourselves quite into agreement with Wagner in the belief that the world ought to take care of him while he was creating his immortal works. Yet there was something large and genial in the conception. The man felt the power that was in him, and he refused to stifle it in order that he might discharge the simple duties of a plain citizen and support himself and his family at the sacrifice of his future, and the future of his art.

It was to this struggle between himself and his own desires on the one hand and his wife and Liszt on the other that his inactivity in musical production for a long period was due. His whole mind was in a state of unrest. Yet the period of his exile proved in the end to be the most fruitful of his life, and in Zurich the name of Wagner was made immortal.

[CHAPTER VIII]
PREACHING WHAT HE PRACTISED

“Doch ich bin so allein.”—Siegfried

The first years of Wagner's residence at Zurich were occupied with the writing of works designed to propagate the reformatory ideas which he aimed at introducing into the composition and performance of opera. It has been noted that after the first performances of "Tannhäuser" he felt that the public would have to be educated up to his conception of art, and he now set to work to produce the necessary doctrinary essays. Through the kindness of Otto Wesendonck, a music-lover and admirer of his work, he was able to rent at a low price a pretty châlet overlooking the lake, and there he lived and laboured in retirement. He was too profoundly discouraged at first to undertake composition, and for five years he brought forth no music. The problem of how to live stared him in the face in all its frightful nakedness. He wrote to Liszt in the fall of 1849:

"How and whence shall I get enough to live? Is my finished work 'Lohengrin' worth nothing? Is the opera which I am longing to complete worth nothing? It is true that to the present generation and to publicity as it is these must appear as a useless luxury. But how about the few who love these works? Should not they be allowed to offer to the poor suffering creator—not a remuneration, but the bare possibility of continuing to create?... Tell me; advise me! Hitherto my wife and I have kept ourselves alive by the help of a friend here. By the end of this month of October our last florins will be gone, and a wide, beautiful world lies before me, in which I have nothing to eat, nothing to warm myself with. Think of what you can do for me, dear, princely friend. Let some one buy my 'Lohengrin,' skin and bones; let some one commission my 'Siegfried.'"

And so he went on, begging Liszt to save him and his wife from absolute want. He had not even an overcoat. The score of "Lohengrin" was eventually sold to Breitkopf and Härtel for a few hundred thalers, but the means of subsistence were provided for Wagner by Liszt and other friends. Yet even in this lamentable state of affairs he could not drive himself to compose. He could only write his literary works. In these he embodied what has come to be known as the Wagnerian theory of the music drama, the theory which finds its only full and satisfying illustration in the works of this master, though its elementary principals were recognised and obeyed by earlier writers. He says himself in "The Music of the Future," "My mental state resembled a struggle. I tried to express theoretically that which under the incongruity of my artistic aims as contrasted with the tendencies of public art, especially of the opera, I could not properly put forward by means of direct artistic production."

The principal works written by him in this state of mind were "Art and Revolution," 1849, "The Art-work of the Future," "Art and Climate," "Judaism in Music," 1850, "Recollections of Spontini," 1851, "On the Performance of 'Tannhäuser,'" and "Opera and Drama," 1852. Of these the last is the most important to the student of Wagner's theories, but at the time of publication it was the article on "Judaism in Music" which raised the largest disturbance. The criticisms of Meyerbeer contained in it have been used by Wagner's enemies down to the present day as evidence that he was an ungrateful man. The fact that these censures were wholly for Meyerbeer, the composer, should, however, be borne in mind; for in Wagner the artist always governed the man, and the timely aid given to him by Meyerbeer in the dark days in Paris was bound to take a place in his estimation second to the popular composer's palpable seeking after the applause of the inartistic masses.

The article on "Judaism in Music" was printed in Brendel's Neue Zeitschrift für Musik for Sept. 3 and 6, 1850. Eleven masters at the Leipsic conservatory, where Brendel lectured on the history of music, wrote to him asking him to resign or reveal the name of the author. He refused to do either, thereby leaving the eleven irate masters in a ludicrous position. But the hostility of the press to Wagner was aroused by the article, for his authorship was speedily suspected. In 1869 he issued a revised and enlarged edition of this article and then a host of replies appeared. None of them, however, dealt candidly with the artistic questions. Most of them rested with accusing Wagner of assailing rival composers because they were Jews. The chief points made in Wagner's article were that the Jews were not an artistic people, that they could not be so because they were not sincere, because they had no nation, no home, no language, but lived to please the people of the country in which they chanced to be and whose language they spoke. Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer were quoted as examples.

In "Opera and Drama" Wagner set forth the principles which, according to him, should govern the creation of art work for the stage. These principles we shall have opportunity to examine in detail when we come to the study of the Wagnerian theories. Let it suffice here to quote Muncker's admirable summary of the essay:

"Systematically he examined in what manner all the arts, plastic, mimic, phonetic and oral, had in the antique tragedy combined to the highest mutual purposes, and how thereafter, released from this close and lifelike union, the single arts had in their individual development either stagnated or degenerated. He refused to acknowledge the objections that only the mild atmosphere of Greece had been able to ripen the artistic power of intuition and formation, out of which the Attic tragedy had grown. Only the historical man, the man independent of nature, has awakened art to life; and only he, noble and strong, who through the highest power of love has attained true liberty, can newly create the vanished dramatic work of art, just as he alone, his life and death, is its subject; for this reason there can be only one principal consideration for art, and that is the true nature of the human race. Strictly Wagner weighed the unsuccessful attempts of the last century externally to combine the sister arts (without any of them giving up their egotistic purposes) in the oratorio and particularly in the opera, the trysting place of their most selfish endeavours. He contrasted with these inorganic species the loving union of the single arts in the work of art of the future, in the true drama, that, like the Attic tragedy, employed the same artistic means, only on a greater scale and with a higher technical perfection, in the same manner and for the same purposes. Like the Attic tragedy, it is to be represented by the people, or rather the totality of different artists is to represent it for the people; just, however, as the single arts can here for the first time freely and naturally unfold their innermost nature, so the individuality of the single artist can, just in that community with the whole, significantly develop itself."

In this essay he ruthlessly exposed the musical shallowness of Rossini and Meyerbeer. He saw at the time that his criticism of the latter would expose him to the charge of ingratitude, but the artist in him prevailed, and he spoke his mind freely. It should be added that he praised certain passages in Meyerbeer's works, especially the great duet in the fourth act of "Les Huguenots."

In the early years of his exile he undertook once more the task of writing an opera for Paris. He went so far as to make a prose sketch of a libretto entitled "Wieland the Smith." In after years he offered the book to Liszt, saying that it reminded him of a period of pain. The labour of writing this work was distasteful to him, and he began it only at the earnest solicitation of his wife and Liszt. The sketch, which is an elaborated scenario, is included in Mr. Ellis's translation of the prose works.

The only musical work which Wagner did in the early years at Zurich was the conducting of some orchestral concerts, and the superintending of performances at the city theatre. It was at this time that Wagner's acquaintance with the afterward famous pianist and conductor, Hans von Bülow, began. Von Bülow had abandoned the career planned for him by his father and gone to Zurich literally to throw himself at the feet of Wagner. The master secured him the post of assistant conductor at the opera, where he supported his protégé against the intriguing of the singers and the orchestra. After six months of experience there Von Bülow was sent with a letter of introduction from Wagner to Liszt, whose pupil he became, and whose daughter Cosima he married. Little did either he or Wagner think at the time that he would be conductor of Wagner's greatest works, and that his wife would become the second spouse of the famous composer.

The year 1850 was made a memorable one in Wagner's life by the first performance of "Lohengrin," which had slept in silence for three years. In the "Communication to My Friends" Wagner wrote of the movement toward the production thus:

"At the end of my latest stay in Paris, as I lay ill and wretched, gazing brooding into space, my eye fell on the score of my already almost quite forgotten 'Lohengrin.' It filled me with a sudden grief to think that these notes should never ring from off the death-wan paper. Two words I wrote to Liszt. His answer was none other than an announcement of preparations the most sumptuous—for the modest means of Weimar—for 'Lohengrin's' production."

Even at this distance the words of that letter of April 21, 1850, are pathetic:

"Dear Friend: I have just been looking through the score of my 'Lohengrin.' I very seldom read my own works. An immense desire has sprung up in me to have this work performed. I address this wish to your heart: Perform my 'Lohengrin'! You are the only one to whom I could address this prayer; to none but you should I entrust the creation of this opera; to you I give it with perfect and joyous confidence."

How faithfully Liszt fulfilled the trust imposed upon him may be seen from one of his letters to Wagner in the course of the preparations for the opera's production.

"Your 'Lohengrin' will be given under exceptional conditions, which are most favourable to its success. The management for this occasion spends about 2,000 thalers, a thing that has not been done in Weimar within the memory of man. The press will not be forgotten, and suitable and seriously conceived articles will appear successively in several papers. All the personnel will be put on its mettle. The number of violins will be slightly increased (from 16 to 18) and a bass clarinet has been purchased. Nothing essential will be wanting in the musical material or design. I undertake all the rehearsals with pianoforte, chorus, strings and orchestra. Genast will follow your indications for the mise-en-scène with zeal and energy. It is understood that we shall not cut a note, not an iota, of your work, and that we shall give it in its absolute beauty, as far as is in our power."

The date chosen for the production was Aug. 28, the birthday of Goethe, when a large number of visitors would be in Weimar to attend the unveiling of a monument to Herder. Wagner was anxious to be present at the performance, but the risk of arrest, if he set foot on German soil, prevented him from going. Liszt was profoundly moved by the work, but he was not satisfied with the performance nor the reception by the public. The singers did not know how to deliver Wagner's music, and the general public found this, the most popular of all Wagner's creations, quite beyond its comprehension. The performance lasted five hours, owing to the singers' treating all the arioso passages as recitatives, and Wagner accordingly wrote to Liszt explaining how this music should be sung. The whole series of letters on the manner of performing "Lohengrin" is full of instruction as to Wagner's dramatic ideas and the proper method of singing his music. Liszt and Genast, the stage manager, however, saw no way out of the difficulty except by making cuts, and these were accordingly made, but under protest from the composer, who authorised only one in the latter part of Lohengrin's narrative.

The production of the most popular of all operas now before the public was accomplished in the absence of its composer. Indeed, it was not until May 15, 1861, in Vienna, that poor Wagner heard this beautiful and touching work. While it was in course of preparation at Weimar he was labouring at Zurich, as we have seen, and was fighting ill-health, too. His low spirits brought on an attack of dyspepsia, and with this came another lifelong enemy, erysipelas. The cheerfulness and devotion of the unhappy Minna helped him through this trying period, and he further solaced himself by long walks into the forest, accompanied by his dog Peps. He declaimed aloud against the density of the public and the machine-made music of some of his contemporaries, and when Peps answered his master's voice with a lively bark, Wagner would pat his head and say, "Thou hast more sense, Peps, than some of these contrapuntists." Liszt continued to push the fortunes of "Tannhäuser" and "Lohengrin" at Weimar, and although it was three years before the latter was performed elsewhere, it became the fashion to visit Weimar to hear it.

Wagner closed the literary work of this period by writing the "Communication to My Friends," which, with the autobiography, forms the most satisfactory material for the study of his early career. This communication is rather a story of his artistic development than of the incidents of his life, but it is a fascinating piece of self-examination, and throws more light than anything else upon the motives which led to the composition of the most famous of Wagner's dramas.

It was at this time that he entered upon the task of writing his long-cherished "Death of Siegfried," which he had shaped into a drama in three acts and a prologue in the autumn of 1848. It was in June, 1849, that he wrote to Liszt that he would have the drama completed in half a year. In the spring of 1851 Liszt learned that there was to be a prefatory drama called "Young Siegfried," and on June 29 Wagner wrote to him that the poem was finished. On Nov. 20 of the same year Wagner wrote a long letter, in which he set forth the development of the entire plan. He had found that his story was too long and complex to tell in two dramas, and that he would have to make three, with a prologue.

Thus he had finally developed the plan of what was to be his most imposing, if not his greatest, work, a work rivalling in the immensity of its conception and its dramatic seriousness the ancient trilogies of the Greeks. It was altogether fitting that this magnum opus should have acquired its full and definite shape in his mind at a time when his invention was refreshed by abstinence from musical production, and when the appetite for composition was springing up anew. Early in 1853 the poem in its new form was completed, and on Feb. 11 he sent a copy to Liszt. The latter wrote: "You are truly a wonderful man, and your 'Nibelung' poem is surely the most incredible thing which you have ever done." In a letter written in 1871, to Arrigo Boïto, the famous Italian composer and librettist, he said: "During a sleepless night at an inn at Spezzia the music to 'Das Rheingold' occurred to me. Straightway I turned homeward and set to work." He finished the full score of "Das Rheingold" in May, 1854, and in the following month he began that of "Die Walküre." The score of this work was finished in 1856, and part of "Siegfried" was written in the next year.

The sleepless night at the Spezzia inn occurred in the course of a journey into Italy made in 1853. It was a journey made in the vain hope of cheering the drooping spirits of Wagner, who was always fond of travel. His life in Zurich had its pleasant side. He had made friends, some of whom, notably Wille, a former journalist of Hamburg, and his wife, a clever novelist, understood and adored him. But he suffered from dyspepsia, insomnia, and erysipelas, the latter returning with wearing persistency; and he writhed under the restraints of an exile which for artistic reasons he could not but desire to terminate. In some of the cities of Germany his works were performed without understanding and in a way to make him shiver with anguish, yet he was helpless. On all sides he was critically assailed for faults that were not his, and would instantly have disappeared if his operas had been properly interpreted. In Berlin, where he might have reaped at least a decent pecuniary profit from performances, jealousy, intrigue, and Philistinism prevented his works from reaching the stage.

And the demon poverty pursued him to the verge of madness. He suffered from the agonising fear that at length he would be forced to abandon all the splendid imaginations that were burning within him and divert his whole life into the sordid channels of bread-and-butter drudgery. He cried to Liszt and other friends to save him. For this he has been called a beggar; but if we obey Charles Reade's injunction, "Put yourself in his place," the thing wears a different aspect. Wagner was profoundly convinced of the greatness that was within him, and it maddened him to think that he might have to stifle it. He wrote to Liszt: "I am in a miserable condition, and have great difficulty in persuading myself that it must go on like this, and that it would not really be more moral to put an end to this disgraceful kind of life."

In these circumstances, it was perhaps the best thing that could have happened to him that in that sleepless night at Spezzia he was haunted by the thought that the music of "Rheingold" must be written, and went home to chain himself again to the pathetic task of heaping one silent score upon another. The time came when he did not believe that he would live to finish the mighty tetralogy which is now the glory of the lyric stage. But even in the face of despair he could not repress the impulses within him, and back to Zurich he went, and the wonderful measures of the prologue of the "Nibelung" drama sprang into being. Even as he had out of despair forged the links of his first success, "Rienzi," so again the fires of anguish lit the forges of the "Schwarzalben" and the "Wonniges Kind."

[CHAPTER IX]
A STRANGER IN A STRANGE LAND

“This red republican of music is to preside over the Old Philharmonic of London, the most classical, orthodox, and exclusive society on this globe.”—Letter of Ferdinand Praeger to the New York Musical Gazette.

The musical activities of this period were about to be interrupted by a voyage so strange that we can hardly conceive it as possible. That Richard Wagner, the reformer, should go to England to conduct the then most stagnant musical organisation in the world, the London Philharmonic, before the most conservative musical public on earth, seems little short of humorous. Yet this thing actually happened. And the musicians of the London orchestra, to their credit, recognised the greatness of their new conductor and played as they had never played before. But this is anticipating. In Zurich he was already known as a conductor before he had set foot on Swiss soil. So it is natural that the musical authorities of the place should have sought his services as soon as he was settled. We have already noted that he conducted some concerts and supervised the operatic performances at the theatre where Von Bülow and Carl Ritter conducted. But the good Swiss were not satisfied with this. They desired the excitement of the production of one of Wagner's works under his own direction. Accordingly, in May, 1852, "The Flying Dutchman" was given, but because the singers treated the work as an old-fashioned opera, it did not make a deep impression. Nevertheless, in February, 1855, "Tannhäuser" was produced in Zurich. It was at this period, too, that Wagner took up the old "Faust" overture and revised it, making changes which drew expressions of delight from Liszt.

At this time the warfare of two musical societies in London was to have an unexpected influence on the movements of Wagner. The London Philharmonic Society had suffered a split, caused by dissensions which need not be discussed here, and a New Philharmonic had been formed. The insurgent forces proceeded to formulate a plan of campaign which threatened disaster to the older army. As a master stroke, they secured as conductor no less a personage than Hector Berlioz, the famous French composer. It now became necessary for the older body to deal a counterblow. But where to turn for a conductor whose name would excite public interest in such a manner as that of Berlioz they knew not. In the midst of their confusion arose Ferdinand Praeger, the London friend and admirer of Wagner, of whom he had first heard through August Roeckel. Praeger knew that there would be opposition to Wagner, but he knew, too, that the name of the composer of the music of the future would arouse public curiosity and that audiences could be got for his concerts. And audiences were what the staid and languishing Old Philharmonic most needed. On the other hand, there was something to be done in London in the way of correcting false impressions of Wagner's works. As Liszt wrote to him on learning that he was to make the visit:

"The London Philharmonic comes in very aptly, and I am delighted. As lately as six months ago people used to shake their heads, and some of them even hissed, at the performance of the 'Tannhäuser' overture, conducted by Costa. Klindworth and Remeny were almost the only ones who had the courage to applaud and to beard the Philistines who had made their nests of old in the Philharmonic. Well, it will now assume a different tone, and you will revivify old England with the Old Philharmonic."

Liszt as usual wrote in an encouraging strain, but it is likely that he really believed that Wagner would profit by some personal contact with the public. For the history of this incident we must turn to the pages of Praeger, who acted as Wagner's private agent in making the engagement, and who first suggested it to Prosper Sainton, the eminent violinist and a director of the Philharmonic. It was an ill-advised visit, but it was made by Wagner chiefly because he hoped through this introduction to the English public to bring out his operas in London. On Jan. 21, 1855, he wrote to Fischer in Dresden:

"At the end of February I go for two months to London, to conduct the concerts of the Philharmonic Society, for which they expressly sent one of their directors here to persuade me. As a rule, that kind of thing does not suit me; and as I am not to get much pay for it, I would scarcely have consented, had I not therein seen a chance of next year bringing together in London—under the protection of the Court—a first-rate German opera company, with which I could give my operas, and at last my 'Lohengrin.'"

Mr. Anderson, conductor of the Queen's private band, and an acting director of the Philharmonic, was sent to Zurich to negotiate with Wagner. Some correspondence had already taken place, and the composer had demanded conditions which were waived after conversation with Mr. Anderson. The question of terms was speedily disposed of, the irresponsible Wagner saying that he was too busy to think about them. After Mr. Anderson had returned to London Wagner wrote to Praeger and suggested giving a concert of his own works, but this alarmed the conservative Philharmonic people, and a compromise was effected by the promise of the performance of selections. It was arranged that the composer should stay at Praeger's house, 31 Milton Street, till a quiet and secluded lodging, where he could go on with the scoring of the trilogy, could be found for him. He arrived in London on Sunday, March 5, 1855. The lodging was found at 22 Portland Terrace, Regent's Park. Much of the work of scoring the "Nibelung" dramas was done at this place.

The first meeting between Wagner and Mr. Anderson in London was not encouraging. The Philharmonic director suggested the performance of a prize symphony by Lachner, whereupon Wagner rose excitedly from his chair and exclaimed: "Have I, therefore, left my quiet seclusion in Switzerland to cross the sea to conduct a prize symphony by Lachner? No, never! If that be a condition of the bargain I at once reject it, and will return."[21]

The matter was smoothed over, but it was only one of several similar outbreaks on the part of the impatient artist. Fortunately, as Praeger notes, Wagner had a keen sense of humour, and when there was a ludicrous aspect in the scenes of misunderstanding it sufficed to put him in a pleasant mood once more.

Wagner made only one visit of ceremony in London, and that was a call on Sir Michael Costa. He flatly refused to call on the musical critics of the London papers, and Praeger says that this was to his injury. This state of affairs is not easy to understand in the United States, where visits to critics are looked upon with suspicion, and are discouraged by the critics themselves. Praeger records that Mr. Davison, the editor of The Musical World, then an influential paper, declared that as long as he held the sceptre of musical criticism, Wagner should not acquire any hold in London. In these circumstances it is not at all astonishing that the new conductor received not a little censure. It is only right to mention, however, that some of the London papers viewed his work without prejudice and praised what appeared to them to be its excellences. That Wagner was an uncommonly fine conductor cannot be doubted, and the musicians of the Philharmonic, as soon as they had recovered from the surprise caused by Wagner's spirited and truthful readings of the works under rehearsal and his emphatic insistence on the correct treatment of every passage, together with vigour of style, applauded him and obeyed him with delight.

The first concert took place on March 12. The programme, like that of all the other concerts, was absurdly long, and this was one of the things against which Wagner vainly fought. The list comprised a symphony by Haydn, an operatic trio, a Spohr violin concerto, the Weber aria, "Ocean, thou mighty monster," Mendelssohn's "Fingal's Cave," overture, Beethoven's "Eroica" symphony, a duet by Marschner, and the overture to "Die Zauberflöte." Wagner amazed the Londoners by giving readings of the orchestral works instead of permitting the orchestra to glide through them in the conventional slovenly way. He even restored the true tempi in the "Eroica," in which London conductors had been playing the first movement slowly and the funeral march quickly. He astonished the great body of Mendelssohnians, which infested London then as it has ever since, by reading the overture with beautiful colour and intelligence. Several of the papers abused him roundly, but The Morning Post discovered in him the ideal conductor.

At the second concert on March 26, Wagner conducted the overture to "Der Freischütz," Beethoven's ninth symphony, and the prelude to "Lohengrin." The Weber overture had to be repeated, which goes to show that the audience was not insensible to Wagner's enthusiastic sympathy with the music of his great predecessor. The dates of the other concerts conducted by Wagner were April 16 and 30, May 14 and 28, and June 11 and 25. In addition to the Beethoven symphonies already mentioned he directed the fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh and eighth; also the "Leonora" overture, No. 3, and the violin concerto, Mozart's symphonies in B flat and C, Mendelssohn's Scotch and Italian symphonies, Spohr's C minor symphony, Cipriani Potter's symphony in G minor, and some minor works. The overture to "Tannhäuser" was produced at the fifth concert, and was received with acclamations by the audience and derision by the critics. It was repeated at the seventh concert by royal command. The Queen and the Prince Consort attended this concert and had Wagner before them in the salon. There the Prince Consort suggested the desirability of translating some of Wagner's operas into Italian that they might be presented in London, and the Queen said, "I am most happy to make your acquaintance. Your composition has charmed me."

Wagner left London the day after his last concert, and he was heartily glad to shake the dust of the British capital off his feet. Musical criticism in London was stilted, timorous, afraid of new thoughts, unable to grasp any departure from the conventionalities with which it was acquainted, and desperately opposed to musical progress along lines not laid down by Mendelssohn and Handel. It was to be expected that the commentors would oppose the entire Wagner system, but the vituperative strain in the criticisms suggests the probability that the writers felt and writhed under the power of the man. It must be understood that similar criticism was written in Germany, and that the "music of the future," as it was derisively called, was not peacefully permitted to become the music of the day. The younger generation of opera-goers cannot realise the state of mind into which their forerunners were thrown when they were asked to accept the opera as a play, and not as a mere string of pretty vocal pieces, loosely connected by the pretence of a plot. In London, where the opera was the amusement of fashionable society, the music of Wagner was bound at first to meet with opposition. For fashionable society always has been and still is opposed to all that is dignified, serious, or uplifting in life or art.

Aside from some scoring of the Nibelung dramas, Wagner did little productive work in the uncongenial atmosphere of London. Praeger introduced to him Karl Klindworth, who was engaged to make piano scores of the first dramas of the trilogy. This was, perhaps, the most serious musical achievement of the London visit. It should be said, however, that the friends whom Wagner found in London were the nucleus of a substantial support for him in that capital, and when the movement to build the Bayreuth Theatre took shape, the English Wagnerites were among the sturdiest upholders of the plan.

Wagner went home to Zurich by way of Paris, and soon after his arrival took his wife for a short visit to Seelisberg, near the Alps. Just before starting his dog Peps died, and the letter in which he communicates this fact to Praeger is so full of warm feeling that it is a revelation of the richness of the heart of this singular and erratic being. He said in part:

"The day of our departure for Seelisberg was already fixed, where, as I wrote to you, I was going with my wife, my dog and bird.[22] Suddenly dangerous symptoms showed themselves in Peps, in consequence of which we put off our journey for two days so as to nurse the poor dying dog. Up to the last moment Peps showed me a love so touching as to be almost heartrending; kept his eyes fixed on me and though I chanced to move but a few steps from him, continued to follow me with his eyes. He died in my arms on the night of the ninth or tenth of this month, passing away without a sound, quietly and peacefully. On the morrow, midday, we buried him in the garden beside the house. I cried incessantly, and since then have felt bitter pain and sorrow for the dear friend of the past thirteen years who ever worked and walked with me. It has clearly taught me that the world exists only in our hearts and conception."

At this period he received an offer to visit America. He mentions it in one of his letters to Praeger and also in other correspondence, especially that with Liszt. He had been told while in London that he would receive this invitation, and he wrote to Liszt: "While here I chew a beggar's crust, I hear from Boston that 'Wagner nights' are given there. Everyone persuades me to come over; they are occupying themselves with me with increasing interest; I might make much money there by concert performances, etc. 'Make much money!' Heavens! I don't want to make money if I can go the way shown me by my longing." Indeed Wagner thought of money only as the means which would enable him to carry out his plans for the production of the Nibelung dramas. He was sorely tempted for a time by the possibility of earning enough in the United States to do as he pleased, but he finally wrote to Liszt, with more than usual penetration, that he was not the kind of man to be successful with a money-making speculation, and that he had decided not to be turned aside from his artistic purposes. And thus ended the attempt to induce Wagner to visit a country, which in its state at that time would have been quite as uncongenial to him as London.

[CHAPTER X]
A SECOND END IN PARIS

“People treat this unfortunate Wagner as a scamp, an impostor, an idiot.”—Hector Berlioz

The composer now set to work right gladly on his "Walküre." He was eager to finish it and begin the writing of what was still called "Jung Siegfried." For a time he was impeded by the illness of his wife and afterwards his own, but on October 3, 1855, he was able to send to Liszt the first two acts of "Die Walküre." Liszt and his beloved Countess Wittgenstein went over them together and both wrote to Wagner of the marvellous effect which this music made upon them. The last act was finished in April, 1856, and was also despatched to Liszt. In October of this year Liszt, the Countess Wittgenstein, and her daughter went to Zurich to visit Wagner. Of course the score of "Die Walküre" occupied their attention, and Liszt, Wagner, and the wife of Kapellmeister Heim gave a rehearsal of the work at the Hotel Bauer before a number of personal friends. The rehearsal moved the hearers greatly and, as Mr. Finck notes, they "would have been no doubt greatly surprised had any one foretold that twenty years would elapse before this drama would have its first adequate performance."

Together, too, Liszt and Wagner gave an orchestral concert at St. Gall, on November 3, 1856, when Wagner conducted the "Eroica" symphony and Liszt his "Orphée" and "Les Préludes." But perhaps the greatest concert of the Zurich series was that given by Wagner in May, 1853, when he assembled an orchestra of 72 men from different parts of Germany, and gave selections from "Lohengrin" as they were never given before and have probably not often been given since. Of his visit Liszt wrote in several of his numerous letters. He said to his friend Dr. Adolf Stern, of Dresden, where the name of Wagner was certainly familiar:

"In spite of my illness I am spending glorious days with Wagner, and am satiating myself with his 'Nibelungen' world, of which our business musicians and chaff-threshing critics have as yet no suspicion. It is to be hoped that this tremendous work may succeed in being performed in the year 1859, and I, on my side, will not neglect anything to forward this performance as soon as possible—a performance which certainly implies many difficulties and exertions. Wagner requires for this purpose a special theatre built for himself, and a not ordinary acting and orchestral staff. It goes without saying that the work can only appear before the world under his own conducting; and if, as is much to be wished, this should take place in Germany, his pardon must be obtained before everything."

These remarks of Liszt admirably sum up the situation in regard to the "Nibelung" dramas. It was long after the date named when they saw the light of publicity, and in the meantime many events of significance were to take place. Not the least of these was to be the temporary abandonment of the beloved Siegfried subject for another work. This was the great "Tristan und Isolde," which many of Wagner's admirers regard as his most inspired creation. This work, like the "Flying Dutchman," the first in which the real Wagner was disclosed, was the fruit of discouragement. Although, through the liberality of Liszt and a few others, including the devoted Mathilde Wesendonck (who is still—August, 1900—living in Berlin), the Wagners were able to live in comfort, and Minna could afford to make Richard a present of silk dressing-gowns and even silk trousers for house wear on his return from London, the composer saw no way to convince the world that he was not a mere bundle of eccentricities, but a master with living embodiments of the true theory of the lyric drama. He was sore at heart, weary of writing a majestic four-night drama which might never see the light of the stage.

In 1854, while he was at work on "Die Walküre," the stories of "Tristan" and "Parsifal" had come to his attention, and the plan of the former work was sketched. In the winter of 1854-55 he wrote to Liszt: "As I have never in life felt the real bliss of love, I must erect a monument to the most beautiful of all my dreams, in which, from beginning to end, that love shall be thoroughly satiated. I have in my head 'Tristan und Isolde,' the simplest, but most full-blooded musical conception. With the black flag which floats at the end of it I shall cover myself to die." In the midst of a letter of January, 1855, Liszt interrupted the discussion of other matters to exclaim: "Stop! One thing I forgot to write to you: Your 'Tristan' is a splendid idea. It may become a glorious work. Do not abandon it." In the summer of 1856 Wagner wrote again: "I have again two splendid subjects which I must execute. 'Tristan und Isolde' you know, and after that the 'Victory,' the most sacred, the most perfect salvation."

This "Victory"[23] was a Buddhistic subject, which Wagner had in mind for a short time, but which he abandoned for the superior attractions of "Parsifal." The leading theme, that of the renunciation of sexual love by the hero, and the assent to it by the heroine, who had at first passionately loved the unmoved hero, bore a close resemblance to the personal purity of Parsifal and to the negation of the desire to live, pictured in "Tristan" as the highest issue of real love. These thoughts appealed to Wagner, whose mind at this time was deeply under the influence of the philosophy of Schopenhauer. The Buddhistic quietism which prevailed in Schopenhauer's philosophy seemed to offer a solution to the life-problems confronting Wagner, and it was natural that he should seek to embody the emotional essence of this philosophy in his music dramas. In 1854 he sent a copy of the poem of the Nibelung dramas to Schopenhauer as a mark of his esteem.

With all these thoughts active in his mind, the poem of Gottfried von Strassburg on "Tristan und Isolde" offered him an opportunity to embody his ideas in what he called the "simplest and most full-blooded musical conception." He was eager to begin a work which might possibly be produced, and all at once came the needed final incentive. Dom Pedro, the Emperor of Brazil, had become interested in the Wagner movement, and he sent an agent to the composer to ask him if he would write an opera for the Italian company in Rio Janeiro. He might name his own terms, provided he would promise to go to Brazil and conduct the work. Wagner was at first touched by this munificent offer, but he soon saw the hopelessness of trying to get Italian opera singers to perform such a music drama as he was about to write. But the Emperor's offer shaped his resolution, and in the latter part of June, 1857, he wrote to Liszt: "I have determined finally to give up my headstrong design of completing the 'Nibelungen.' I have led my young Siegfried to a beautiful forest solitude and there have left him under a linden tree, and taken leave of him with heartfelt tears." And later, in the same letter, he told Liszt that he had decided to write "Tristan und Isolde" and have it performed at Strassburg with Niemann and Mme. Meyer.

On the last day of 1857 the first act of "Tristan" was finished. Wagner now made a trip to Paris, on money borrowed from Liszt, in the hope of being able to arrange a performance of "Rienzi," but nothing came of the journey, except that a waiter in the house in which he lived stole a large part of the advance royalties which Breitkopf and Härtel had paid him on the completion of the first act of the new work. He returned to Zurich and there Liszt sent to him Carl Tausig, the pianist, who became one of his firmest friends and supporters, and who subsequently made the piano arrangement of "Die Meistersinger." Tausig, with all his genius, was only a boy of seventeen at this time, and he could not satisfy the craving of Wagner for sympathetic intellectual companionship. Unfortunately the composer had in previous years sought this in the society of Mrs. Wesendonck, before mentioned, and aroused the jealousy of poor Minna. This jealousy led in 1856 to an open outbreak, for Wagner wrote to Praeger, who was on his way back to London after a visit to the composer, "The devil is loose. I shall leave Zurich at once and come to you in Paris." But a little later he wrote that the matter had been smoothed over. This, however, was one of the evidences that this unhappily assorted union was slowly nearing its dissolution.

In June, 1858, Wagner sketched the second act of "Tristan und Isolde," and then a desire for quiet and the luxurious atmosphere of Italy took possession of him. Venice, not having any German alliance, and there being consequently no danger of his arrest there, seemed to be the desired place, and thither he went. He wrote the music of the second act of the opera in Venice. Then came news that a projected production of "Rienzi" in Munich had been abandoned, and that a new Intendant, who had no artistic feeling, had gone to reign in Weimar and make Liszt powerless. On the heels of these misfortunes came an attempt of the Saxon government to drive him out of Venice. Disheartened, embarrassed, and in debt, he went to Switzerland and secluded himself on the shores of the Lake of Lucerne. There in the summer of 1859 he completed, after four months' work, the third act of "Tristan." The completed score was placed in the hands of Breitkopf and Härtel, and then Wagner set to work to find an opening for its production. Various difficulties arose. In some places where he could have had singers he dared not set foot. In other places he could get no competent performers.

Wagner's final departure from Zurich was undoubtedly due to the action of Mr. Wesendonck. The nature of the attachment between Mrs. Wesendonck and the composer could no longer be concealed. Wagner had dedicated to her a sonata and the prelude to "Die Walküre." He had set words of hers to music. She was his friend, his confidante. According to M. Belart, in whose "Richard Wagner in Zurich," published in Leipsic in 1900, this whole matter was discussed, Wagner left Zurich finally and suddenly on Aug. 17, 1859. Mr. Wesendonck, when questioned about the matter in after years, said flatly that he compelled Wagner to go. He went to Jacob Sulzer, previously mentioned, borrowed some money, and started for Geneva. Minna Wagner went to Dresden. This was the beginning of the end between them. There is some discrepancy in the dates. There is no doubt that Wagner went to Lucerne when he returned from Venice, but he must have gone again to Zurich in the course of the summer. At any rate when he went to Geneva, he was en route for Paris, and the Wesendonck entanglement was at an end. In 1865 Wagner wrote to the injured husband:

"The incident that separated me from you about six years ago should be evaded; it has upset me and my life enough that you recognise me no longer, and that I esteem myself less and less. All this suffering should have earned your forgiveness, and it would have been beautiful, noble, to have forgiven me; but it is useless to demand the impossible, and I was in the wrong."

It was in September, 1859, that Wagner arrived in the French capital. He settled in the Rue Newton, near the Arc de Triomphe, and there he and Minna, who had rejoined him, received their friends every Wednesday. Among the frequenters of their home were Émile Ollivier, the French statesman and husband of Liszt's daughter Blandine; Frédéric Villot, keeper of the imperial museums; Edmond Roche, afterward the translator of "Tannhäuser"; Hector Berlioz, Carvalho, director of the Théâtre Lyrique; Gustave Doré, Jules Ferry, Charles Baudelaire, and A. de Gasparini, afterward one of the biographers of Wagner.

Later, when the composer had taken a new residence at No. 3, Rue d'Aumale, there was added to this number Cosima, a younger daughter of Liszt, married two years previously to Hans von Bülow. By arrangement with M. Carvalho, Wagner gave three concerts in the Théâtre des Italiens on Jan. 25, and Feb. 1 and 8, 1860. The overture to "Tannhäuser" and the prelude to "Tristan und Isolde" were given at these entertainments. These concerts were pecuniarily disastrous, and so also were two given in Brussels in March. Both press and public were nonplussed by Wagner's music, and it remained for Hector Berlioz to lead, by an article published in the Gazette Musicale, in the subsequent general attack. Meanwhile Wagner was striving to induce M. Carvalho to produce "Tannhäuser" at the Théâtre Lyrique, when suddenly an unexpected power intervened.

According to Wagner's account given to Praeger, the Emperor Napoleon III., in conversation with the Princess Metternich, asked her if she had heard the latest opera of Prince Poniatowski. She answered that she had, and that she did not care for such music. "But is it not good?" asked the Emperor. "No," she responded. "But where is better music to be got, then?" "Why, your Majesty, you have at the present moment the greatest composer that ever lived in your capital." "Who is he?" "Richard Wagner." "Then why do they not give his operas?" "Because he is in earnest, and would require all kinds of concessions and much money." "Very well; he shall have carte blanche." The Emperor accordingly gave orders that "Tannhäuser" should be mounted at the Grand Opéra. This stroke of fortune came like lightning out of a clear sky, yet Wagner was not altogether blind to the difficulties in the way of a satisfactory performance.

With the scenic preparations, which now began, he was delighted, for the resources and skill of the leading opera house of Europe were at his disposal. But the lack of singers trained in the theory of the lyric drama hampered him. He stipulated that Albert Niemann should be engaged for the title rôle, and that he should have time to learn the French text. He asked for Faure to create the rôle of Wolfram for the Parisians, but that new and rising star demanded too large a salary, and Morelli was engaged for the part. With this singer, and Mme. Tedesco, the Venus, Wagner had no end of trouble, as they were Italians and utterly without comprehension of his ideas. Marie Saxe, who had a lovely voice, was wooden in her acting, and Wagner had to drive her to movement and life. Edmond Roche's translation of the text proved to be too rough for use, and finally Charles Nuitter, who translated Bellini's "Roméo et Juliette" for the Opéra, was employed to finish the work.

In his anxiety to make himself and his purposes known to the Parisians Wagner published four of his dramatic poems, prefaced by a letter on music,[24] in which he endeavoured to set forth his ideas. M. Adolphe Jullien says of this letter: "As Wagner had in 1860 already written 'Tristan und Isolde,' and as that poem figured in his book, he instinctively carried the history of his life and of the development of his ideas beyond the point of 'Tristan,' without reflecting that he was thereby exceeding his aim, it being simply a question of preparing people to hear 'Tannhäuser.'" There is no doubt that this letter did much to confuse those Frenchmen who read it and to deepen the spirit of opposition to Wagner's reformatory theories.

But despite all these things the production of "Tannhäuser" might have come to a successful issue but for one difficulty. The gentlemen of the Jockey Club, who were among the most important of the subscribers to the Opéra, and who, of course, did not at any time desire to take the entertainment seriously, were in the habit of arriving after their dinners in time for the ballet. In the original version of "Tannhäuser" there was no attempt at a ballet, and Alphonse Royer, the director of the Grand Opéra, besought Wagner to introduce one in the hall of song, in the second act. This the composer peremptorily refused to do, because it would interfere with the dramatic integrity of the scene. He would consent only to a rearrangement of the first scene, where, in the revels in the Venusberg, a ballet with some significance might be introduced. He therefore rewrote this scene, cutting out the stirring finale of the overture and raising the curtain on the second appearance of the bacchanalian music, which was now extended and elaborated so that a pantomimic ballet might be danced. He also elaborated the scene between Tannhäuser and Venus, after this ballet, according to his later conceptions of music drama. The music of this new scene was written in the style of "Tristan und Isolde," and, at every performance of the Parisian version of "Tannhäuser," obstinately refuses to amalgamate in style with the rest of the score. This whole new scene was beyond the comprehension of the Parisian public of 1861, but might have been tolerated had it not been a direct affront to the subscribers. A further element of danger lay in the fact that the conductor was no other than Dietsch, the musician who had failed with "The Phantom Ship" after Wagner had sold that text to Léon Pillet.

The first performance took place on Wednesday, March 13, 1861. After the first act the gentlemen of the Jockey Club went out and bought all the hunting whistles they could get, and as soon as the second act began they set up a din which gradually drowned out the performance except in the forte passages. In the third act pandemonium reigned, and the thrilling narrative of Tannhäuser was unheard in the chorus of yells from the auditorium. Wagner's friends applauded, and the Emperor on several occasions led the favourable demonstrations, but Wagner was taught that in Paris the coryphée ranked above high art. Before the second performance, March 18, Royer succeeded in inducing Wagner to cut out some of the most familiar parts of the work, a portion of the Venus scene, the plaintive melody of the shepherd's pipe, the hunting horns and the appearance of the dogs at the end of the first act, and other similar things, all now known to every lover of Wagner's work. The gentlemen of the Jockey Club again drowned the latter half of the opera with their whistles, despite the plain protest of a large part of the audience led by the Emperor. The third performance was given on a Sunday in order that the subscribers might not be present. That the general public was interested in the opera is proved by the receipts: First performance, 7,491 francs; second, 8,415; third, 10,764.

Wagner now refused to allow the performances to continue, and as he had borne much of their expense he left Paris burdened with debts. But the shrieks of the Jockey Club whistles had resounded across the Rhine and stirred up a Teutonic indignation, which was eventually to be of much benefit to him. The French public was not unjust to Wagner; he knew that and testified to it; but, as Charles Baudelaire exclaimed in his pamphlet on the episode, "'Tannhäuser' was not even heard."

[CHAPTER XI]
A MONARCH TO THE RESCUE

“My King, thou rarest shield of this my living.”—Wagner

Wagner went from Paris to Vienna, where he hoped that a production of "Tristan und Isolde" might be arranged. The manager of the opera house, when he learned that the composer was about to visit the city, prepared a special performance of "Lohengrin." This took place on May 15, 1861, and for the first time Wagner himself heard the work which has touched the hearts of so many thousands of his fellow-creatures. At the end of each act the audience forced him to acknowledge its applause, and at the conclusion of the performance he was called before the curtain three times and compelled to make a brief speech. Many times afterward did he refer to the intoxication of that wondrous May night. Think of it! Thirteen years after it was written, and eleven years after its first performance, the writer of the most popular opera in the world heard it for the first time. And even then this master, who had already written "Rienzi," "The Flying Dutchman," "Tannhäuser," "Lohengrin," "Das Rheingold," "Die Walküre," part of "Siegfried," and "Tristan und Isolde," was a wanderer on the face of the earth, an outcast, and could not make a living from his music.

His early works were now beginning to find their way to the stage, but the royalties paid in the German theatres were too small and the performances too infrequent to bring him in a satisfactory income. His first effort, therefore, was to get "Tristan und Isolde" produced, and to his great joy the manager of the Vienna opera accepted the score. Preparations were at once made for the production. But, alas! that was still far away. The rehearsals began in the fall, but the tenor, Ander, was taken sick, and the whole winter was lost. When the work was resumed, it dragged along at a snail's pace, and finally, after fifty-four rehearsals, the drama was abandoned as impossible. Ander, the Tristan, told Dr. Hanslick that as fast as he learned one act he forgot another. Wagner, on the contrary, asserted in after years that all the singers went through the whole work with him at the piano. However, it is not difficult to conceive that the artists of that day may have found "Tristan und Isolde" impracticable, seeing that the work never was really sung until within the last half-dozen years, when the greatest vocal artists of the world appeared in it.

While the Viennese were floundering, Wagner found it necessary to do something toward earning money, and so he undertook a concert tour. In Carlsruhe, Prague, and Weimar negotiations for the production of Tristan fell through, but in the last-named place Wagner was royally received in the summer by Liszt and the other musicians. The general amnesty which had been granted some years before to the rebels of 1848 made it possible for him to go openly to Germany, except the kingdom of Saxony, and even that was soon opened to him. He planned a tour, and reluctantly prepared to produce excerpts from his own works, as the only means of advertising them. He confesses that dire necessity forced him to this step so inconsistent with his theories, and his enemies did not hesitate to taunt him with the inconsistency. He was alone in his travels, for the winter of 1861 in Paris had been the last straw on the back of the patient Minna. She could no longer endure her life with this "monster of genius," who would not be a faithful husband, who wrote works ridiculed by the world, and could not earn bread and butter. She left him and went back to Leipsic to live with her relatives. She and her husband never came together again, though they occasionally referred to one another with tolerance in their letters to third persons. Minna died in 1866.

The concert tour began in the winter of 1862, and Wagner travelled in Germany and even into Russia. In the latter country alone did his entertainments bring him in any substantial pecuniary returns. He was in Moscow when he learned that the rehearsals of "Tristan und Isolde" had been abandoned at Vienna. He had become indifferent on the subject. He was almost convinced that he ought to give up his attempt to be a composer. Mr. Finck notes that at one time he seriously thought of going to India as a tutor in an English family. Let it be borne in mind that in 1863, while he was still wandering about, giving these concerts, he was fifty years old, and that, with a surging consciousness within him that he had created immortal works, he was stared at by people wherever he went as a freak and a madman, and was caricatured and ridiculed by almost the whole press of Europe. And all this because he had dared to say that an opera was a poetic drama, and should be so written, so performed, and so received by the public.

Yet in these years of hardship, sorrow, and discouragement he wrote the text of his most humorous work. He took up and completed the book of "Die Meistersinger," of which he had made a sketch in 1845, just after the production of "Tannhäuser." This work was done in the course of a temporary residence in Paris in the winter of 1861-62. The text was published, or rather printed for circulation among his friends, in 1862. The version now known to all music lovers shows many changes. The copyright of the drama was sold to Messrs. Schott, of Mainz, and accordingly Wagner went to Biebrich, a little town opposite Mainz, to compose the music. He subsequently continued his labours at Penzing, near Vienna, and there also he published the text of "Der Ring des Nibelungen" as a piece of literature. He declared that he did not expect to finish the music, and that he had no hope of living to see the work performed. It was at this time that Wagner's affairs sank into such a state that he was overwhelmed. He decided to go to Russia and remain there the rest of his life. But first he must finish the score of "Die Meistersinger." So he wrote to his old friend, Mme. Wille, at Zurich, and asked her to receive him for a short time. Like the familiar man in the play, he arrived on the heels of his letter, and Frau Wille had to exert herself to make all ready for the great man. But she realised that all Wagner's doings and sayings would have historical importance, and she made notes from which she afterward published a valuable article.

From this we learn that the great musician while in her home was the prey of conflicting emotions, but was most frequently plunged in despair. He had a deep, a passionate conviction of his own powers. He was inspired with an absolute prevision of the worldwide glorification that would come to his name when once his works were adequately made known. And because of this he suffered agonies of mind and heart while the scores lay silent in his desk. He cried out against the niggardliness of a world which refused him a few luxuries when he was preparing joy for so many thousands. He felt that the time would come when the world would be ready to heap all kinds of honours on his head, but he feared that it would come too late.

Yet in this state of mind the genius of production would not sleep within him. He worked unceasingly at the score of "Die Meistersinger," and, according to Mme. Wille's own account, with a perfect satisfaction as to its greatness. Wagner had what has frequently been called the vanity of men of genius. He spoke with childish naïveté of his works. He spoke of himself without hesitation as a great man, and he had not even the slightest consciousness that a difference of opinion was possible. But such vanity is pardonable in a man who so thoroughly justifies it. Cicero, Napoleon, and Beethoven had a similar sort of vanity. The world has learned to smile indulgently upon it. And whereas in Wagner's lifetime his vanity and love of luxury made him perhaps not an altogether agreeable companion, they detract in no way from his claims to recognition as one of the most remarkable men ever born.

One day, while at the Willes', Wagner received word that his Viennese creditors were on his track, and he resolved to go away. He was at his wits' end, for everywhere "Tristan" was pronounced impossible, and "Die Meistersinger" was refused before the score was seen. He went to Stuttgart with the vain hope that he could arrange for the performance of some of his operas there and thus earn enough to stave off misfortune for a time. And even while he had fled, his fortune was pursuing him. At last to this weary wanderer, this "Flying Dutchman" of musical history, were to come rest and peace and a perfect love. At last one dream of all his years of insatiable longing was to be realised. At last his scores would sound "from off the death-wan paper," and the world would learn the true might of Richard Wagner.

In the preface to the poem of the "Nibelung's Ring," Wagner had described the means and manner of performance—had, in a word, laid down the plan of Bayreuth. But he felt that only a monarch could afford to give the financial support to such a scheme, and he wrote, "Will that king be found?" Now there was a young prince who fed his soul on Wagner's works and who worshipped the master in secret. At fifteen he had heard "Lohengrin," and, like all whose operatic experience began with Wagner, he had become an ardent Wagnerite. He had watched his idol's career of misfortune in helpless pity. And then suddenly the King of Bavaria went to join his fathers and this generous youth seated himself upon the throne. One of his first acts was to send a messenger to bid Wagner come to his capital and complete the majestic labours of his life in peace.

Herr Sauer, the appointed messenger, searched high and low. He delved in Wagner's old haunts at Vienna, but the very memory of the mad composer seemed to have gone. So he went down to Switzerland and hunted in Zurich and Lucerne. But there was no Wagner. Then Baron Hornstein, a minor composer, met him out in a boat on Lake Lucerne and told him that Wagner was in Stuttgart. At any rate this is the story told to Mr. Finck by Heinrich Vogl, the tenor, who said that Wagner confirmed it. Sauer took Wagner to Munich, and there on May 4, 1864, he wrote to Frau Wille that it all seemed like a dream.

"He wants me to be with him always, to work, to rest, to produce my works; he will give me everything I need; I am to finish my Nibelungen and he will have them performed as I wish. I am to be my own unrestricted master; not Kapellmeister—nothing but myself and his friend. All troubles are to be taken from me; I shall have whatever I need, if only I stay with him."

This enthusiastic youth of eighteen, with a royal treasury at his disposal, and the splendid musical traditions of Munich reaching away behind him to the era of Orlando Lasso, was to be the saviour of Wagner's work. He was already a worshipper of the art of the master, and he speedily proved himself to be attached to him by a deep personal affection. On Lake Starnberg, no great distance from Munich, the King gave Wagner a pretty villa, and there he spent the summer of 1864. The King's summer palace was only a mile or two away, and the monarch and composer were much in one another's company. The young King's friendship was of a passionate kind, such as only romantic youths entertain, and, unfortunately, of the sort that was sure in the course of time to lead to scandalous comment in the polite society of a court.

In honour of his new patron Wagner wrote in that summer the "Huldigungs Marsch," which has the romantic character implanted in all Wagner's concert pieces. Here, too, at the wish of his young patron, Wagner wrote his essay on "State and Religion" (Mr. Ellis's translation, Vol. IV.). As in all the other writings of Wagner bearing upon the conduct of a State, in this essay art is held up as the panacea for all ills. He saw the ideal of the State embodied in the person of the King, who by the nature of his position must take life most seriously, and in whose inability to attain ideal justice and humanity there is something tragic. But for these ideals the King is bound to strive and so must lead a life of misery if he does not seek the only solace, namely, religion. Then follows a long definition of religion. How shall the King endure? By refreshing his mind with the pleasing distractions of art. The essay easily convinces the reader that Wagner was not, as he often wished to be, a philosopher, but simply an artist whose reasoning flexibly followed the flow of his ruling instincts.

So passed the first summer under the royal protection, pleasantly, almost idyllically. But now serious work was to begin. In the autumn the two friends returned to Munich. A residence in a quiet part of the city was set apart for the use of Wagner, and he prepared to resume the production of his masterpieces. Hans von Bülow, his former pupil, was summoned with a view to his becoming the conductor of "Tristan und Isolde." This beginning was effected in the summer, for Mme. von Bülow, little dreaming whither she was going, arrived in Munich with her two daughters in June, and Von Bülow followed the next month. The influence of Cosima von Bülow upon Wagner began at once. He had been lonely and depressed ever since his separation from his wife, and the advent of this woman of artistic temperament and commanding intellect, the fruit of the illicit union of Franz Liszt and the brilliant Countess d'Agoult (the "Daniel Stern" of French literature), aroused in him new conceptions of the "eternal woman-soul."

Peter Cornelius, the pupil of Liszt and composer of the admirable "Barber of Bagdad," was also summoned, and not far away lived the young Hans Richter, afterward to be one of the principal conductors of Wagner's music. The ardent young King was all eagerness to begin the work of performance, but Wagner was hampered by the want of singers capable of singing such new music as that of "Tristan und Isolde." In Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld and his wife were found representatives of the hero and heroine, but Wagner foresaw that the method of singing the music drama of the future would need wide study, and so he wrote a long paper on a plan for a school of music in Munich. This paper gave a detailed outline of the operation of a conservatory, and set forth as its purpose the artistic interpretation of the works of the older German masters, and leading thence to the treatment of the modern music drama. The old Munich Conservatory was closed by the King's order in the early summer of 1865. But the plan to reopen it on the lines laid down by Wagner failed through the hostility of the local musicians. It was reopened in 1867 under Hans von Bülow, who was able to carry out Wagner's ideas only to a limited extent.

In October the King decided that "Der Ring des Nibelungen" should be produced, and the date was set for it three years thence. On December 4 "Der Fliegende Holländer" was performed, and on December 11, January 1, and February 1 Wagner conducted concerts. In January Gottfried Semper, the architect, was called to Munich to be consulted about plans for the new theatre for the Nibelung dramas. And meanwhile the preparations for the production of "Tristan" went forward. Wagner's star was at last in the ascendant.