Volume 2 / Part 3 — PART III (continued 3)

But it was the personal relations which grew out of my stay in London that provided the strangest aspect of my life there.

Immediately after my arrival, Karl Klindworth, a young pupil of Liszt, who had been recommended to me as particularly gifted, came to see me. He became a faithful and intimate friend, not only during my stay in London, but ever after. Young as he was, the short time he had spent in London had sufficed to give him an opinion of English musical life, the justice of which I was soon compelled to admit, terrible though it was. Incapable of adapting himself to the curiously organised English musical cliques, he at once lost all reasonable prospect or hope of meeting with the recognition due to his talent. He resigned himself to making his way through the dreary wastes of English musical life solely by giving lessons like a day-labourer, being too proud to pay the smallest attentions to the ruling critics, who had fallen on him immediately as a pupil of Liszt. He was really an excellent musician, and in addition a distinguished pianist. He immediately approached me with the request to be allowed to make a pianoforte arrangement of the score of Rheingold, for the use only of virtuosi of the first rank. Unfortunately, he was overtaken by a tedious illness, which robbed me for a long time of the desired intercourse with him.

Although Prager and his wife stood by me with great constancy, my real centre of intimacy was the original Sainton-Luders' household. I had a standing invitation to dine with them, and I found occasion, with few exceptions, to take my meals with these friends, whose devotion surpassed that of all the others. It was here that I generally found relaxation from the unpleasantness of my business relations in London. Prager was often present, and we frequently took an evening stroll through the foggy streets. On such occasions Ludors would fortify us against the inclemency of the London climate by an excellent punch which he could prepare under any conditions. Only once did we get separated, and that was in the terrific crowd that accompanied the Emperor Napoleon from St. James's Palace to Covent Garden Theatre one evening. He had come over to London with his Consort, on a visit to Queen Victoria, during the critical stage of the Crimean War, and the Londoners gaped at him as he passed no less greedily than other nations are apt to do under similar circumstances. It so befell that I was taken for a pushing sightseer, and proportionately punished by blows in the ribs when I was crossing the road to try and get into Regent Street from the Haymarket. This caused me much amusement, on account of the obvious misunderstanding.

The grave annoyances which arose, partly from the peculiarly momentous quarrel between Sainton and Mr. Anderson (instigated by Costa), and which deprived me of every possibility of obtaining any influence over the society, were productive, on the other hand, of some amusing experiences. Anderson had, it seemed, succeeded in elevating himself to the post of conductor of the Queen's band, through the influence of the Queen's private coachman. As he possessed absolutely no knowledge of music, the annual court concert which he had to conduct became a very feast of absurdity to the unruly Sainton, and I heard some very funny stories about it. Another thing brought to light in the course of these imbroglios was that Mrs. Anderson, whom I had christened Charlemagne on account of her great corpulency, had appropriated to herself, among other things, the office and salary of a court trumpeter. I soon arrived at the conviction, from these and other similar reports, that my lively friend would be beaten by this snug little clique in the war of disclosures, and was able subsequently to see the decision go against him at the point when either he or Anderson had to give way. This confirmed my idea that in this free country of England, things were managed in much the same way as elsewhere.

The arrival of Berlioz made a very important addition to our little company. He, too, had been brought over to London, to conduct two of the New Philharmonic Society's concerts. The society had appointed as ordinary conductor, by whose recommendation I could never discover, a certain Dr. Wilde, a typical chubby-faced Englishman, remarkably good-natured, but ludicrously incompetent. He had taken some special lessons in conducting from the Stuttgart conductor, Lindpaintner, who had trained him up to the point of at least attempting to catch up the orchestra with his beat, the orchestra itself going its own way entirely. I heard a Beethoven symphony performed in this fashion, and was surprised to hear the audience break into precisely the same applause with which it greeted one of my own strictly accurate and really fiery performances. To lend distinction to these concerts, however, they had, as I said, invited Berlioz over for some of them. I thus heard him conduct some classical works, such as a Mozart symphony, and was amazed to find a conductor, who was so energetic in the interpretation of his own compositions, sink into the commonest rut of the vulgar time-beater. Certain of his own compositions, such as the more effective fragments from the Romeo and Juliet Symphony, again made a particular impression on me, it is true; but I was now more consciously awake to the curious weaknesses which disfigure even the finest conceptions of this extraordinary musician than on those earlier occasions, when I only had a sense of general discomfort adequate to the magnitude of the impression.

I felt much stimulated, however, on the two or three occasions when Sainton invited me to dine with Berlioz. I was now brought face to face with this strangely gifted person, tormented and even blunted in some respects as he then was. When I saw him, a man considerably my senior, coming here merely in the hope of earning a few guineas, I could deem myself perfectly happy, and almost floating on air, by contrast; for my own coming had been brought about rather by a desire for distraction, a craving for outward inspiration. His whole being expressed weariness and despair, and I was suddenly seized with deep sympathy for this man whose talent so far surpassed that of his rivals—for this was clear as daylight to me. Berlioz seemed to be pleasantly affected by the attitude of gay spontaneity I adopted with him. His usual short, almost reserved, manner thawed visibly during the friendly hours we passed together. He told me many comical things about Meyerbeer, and the impossibility of escaping from his flattery, which was dictated by his insatiable thirst for laudatory articles. The first performance of his Prophet had been preceded by the customary diner de la veille, and when Berlioz excused himself for staying away, Meyerbeer first reproached him tenderly, then challenged him to make good the great injustice he had done him, by writing 'a real nice article' about his opera. Berlioz declared it was impossible to get anything detrimental to Meyerbeer inserted in a Paris paper.

I found it less easy to discuss with him matters of a more profound artistic nature, as I invariably came up against the real Frenchman then, who, fluent and glib of tongue, was so sure of himself that it never occurred to him to doubt whether he had understood his companions aright. Once, in a pleasant glow of inspiration (having suddenly mastered the French language, to my own great surprise), I tried to express to him my idea of the 'artistic conception.' I endeavoured to describe the powerful effect of vital impressions on the temperament, how they hold us captive, as it were, until we rid ourselves of them by the unique development of our inmost spiritual visions, which are not called forth by these impressions, but only roused by them from their deep slumber. The artistic structure, therefore, appears to us as in no wise a result of, but, on the contrary, a liberation from, the vital impressions. At this point Berlioz smiled in a patronising, comprehensive way, and said: 'Nous appelons cela: digerer.' My amazement at this prompt summing-up of my laboured communications was further justified by my new friend's outward behaviour. I invited him to be present at my last concert, and also at a small farewell feast which I was giving at home to my few friends after it. He soon left the table, saying that he felt unwell, but the friends who were left made no secret to me of their belief that Berlioz had been put out of humour by the exceedingly enthusiastic farewell with which the audience had parted from me.

The total harvest, however, of acquaintances I made in London was not particularly profitable. I took pleasure in the society of Mr. Ellerton, a dignified, agreeable man, the brother-in-law of Lord Brougham—a poet, a music-lover, and, alas! a composer. He asked to be introduced to me at one of the Philharmonic concerts, and did not hesitate to tell me that he welcomed me to London because it seemed likely that I was destined to check the exaggerated Mendelssohn worship. He was also the only Englishman who honoured me by any hospitality, and by entertaining myself and my friends at the University Club, gave me an opportunity of realising the munificence of such an establishment in London. After we had spent a very agreeable time there, I had a glimpse of the weaker side of English hospitalities of this order, though the incident was friendly enough. My host had to be taken home by two men, one holding each arm, quite as a matter of course, as it was obvious that he would not have got far across the road without this help.

I made the acquaintance, too, of a curious man, an old-fashioned but very friendly composer named Potter. I had to play a symphony of his, which entertained me by its modest dimensions and its neat development of counterpoint, the more so as the composer, a friendly elderly recluse, clung to me with almost distressing humility. I had positively to force him into accepting the right tempo for the Andante in his symphony, thus proving to him that it was really pretty and interesting. He had so little faith in his work, that he considered the only way to avoid the danger of boring people with it was to rattle through it at a disgraceful speed. He really beamed with delight and gratitude when I secured him great applause by taking this very Andante at my own time.

I got on less well with a Mr. MacFarrine, a pompous, melancholy Scotsman, whose compositions, I was assured, were held in high esteem by the committee of the Philharmonic Society. He seemed too proud to discuss the interpretation of any of his works with me, and I was therefore relieved when a symphony of his, which did not appeal to me, was laid aside, the substitute chosen being an overture entitled the Steeple-chase, which I enjoyed playing, on account of its peculiarly wild, passionate character.

My acquaintance with Beneke (a merchant) and his family was attended by much awkwardness. Wesendonck had given me a letter of recommendation to them, so that I should at least have one 'house' to go to in London. I had to travel a full German mile to Camberwell in response to their invitations, only to discover that I had dropped into the very family whose house Mendelssohn had made his home when in London. The good people did not know what to do with me, apart from congratulating me on the excellence of my Mendelssohn performances, and rewarding me with descriptions of the generous character of the deceased.

Howard, the secretary of the Philharmonic Society, a worthy and agreeable old man, was another person (the only one, he believed) in the circle of my English acquaintances who took the trouble to entertain me. I had to go once or twice to the Italian Opera at Covent Garden with his daughter. There I heard Fidelio, given in rather grotesque fashion by unclean Germans and voiceless Italians, and with recitatives. I consequently managed to evade paying frequent visits to this theatre. When I went to say good-bye to Mr. Howard on leaving London, I was surprised to meet Meyerbeer at his house. He had just arrived in London to conduct his Nordstern. As I saw him come in it occurred to me immediately that Howard, whom I had only known as the secretary of the Philharmonic Society, was also the musical critic of the Illustrated London News; it was in the latter capacity that the great operatic composer had called upon him. Meyerbeer was absolutely paralysed when he saw me, and this put me into such a frame of mind that we found it impossible to exchange a word. Mr. Howard, who had felt sure that we were acquainted, was much surprised at this, and asked me as I was leaving whether I did not know Meyerbeer. I answered that he had better ask Meyerbeer. On meeting Howard again that evening, I was assured that Meyerbeer had spoken of me in terms of the highest praise. I then suggested his reading certain numbers of the Paris Gazette musicale, in which Fetis had, some time before, given a less favourable interpretation of Meyerbeer's views about me. Howard shook his head, and could not understand how two such GREAT COMPOSERS could meet in so strange a manner.

A visit from my old friend Hermann Franck was a pleasant surprise. He was then staying at Brighton, and had come up to London for a few days. We conversed a great deal, and I had to make a considerable effort to put him right in his ideas about me, as he had heard the most wonderful reports from German musicians during the last few years in which our intercourse had been broken off. He was astonished, in the first place, to find me in London, where he considered it impossible for me ever to find a suitable field for my musical tendencies. I did not understand what he meant by my 'tendencies,' but I told him quite simply how I came to accept the invitation of the Philharmonic Society, and that I proposed to fulfil my contract for this year's concerts, and then to go back to my work at Zurich without further ceremony. This sounded quite different to the state of things he had imagined, for he had felt bound to conclude that I proposed to create a stronghold in London from which to conduct a war of extermination against the whole race of German musicians. This was the unanimous explanation of my intentions which he had heard in Germany. Nothing could be more astounding, he said, than the surprising incongruity between the fictitious form in which I appeared to these people, and my real nature, which he had recognised at once on seeing me again. We joked about this, and came to a closer understanding. I was glad to see that he valued as much as I did the works of Schopenhauer, which had become known in the last few years. He expressed his opinion of them with singular decision; he considered that German intellect was destined, either to complete deterioration, in conjunction with the national political situation, or else to an equally complete regeneration, in which Schopenhauer would play his part. He left me—soon to meet his terrible and not less inexplicable fate. Only a few months later, after my return home, I heard of his mysterious death. He was staying, as I said, at Brighton, for the purpose of putting his son, a boy of about sixteen, into the English navy. I had noticed that the son's obstinate determination to serve in this force was repugnant to his father. On the morning of the day on which the ship was to sail, the father's body was found shattered in the street, as the result of a fall from the window, while the son was found lifeless—apparently strangled—on his bed. The mother had died some years previously, and there was no one left to give information as to the terrible occurrence, which, so far as I know, has never to this day been cleared up. Franck had, out of forgetfulness, left a map of London behind on his visit to me; this I kept, as I did not know his address, and it is still in my possession.

I have pleasanter, though not entirely unclouded, recollections of my relations with Semper, whom I also met in London, where he had been settled for some time with his family. He had always seemed to me so violent and morose when in Dresden that I was surprised and moved to admiration by the comparatively calm and resigned spirit with which he bore the terrible interruption to his professional career, and by his readiness to adapt his talent (which was of an unusually productive order) to the circumstances in which he was placed. Commissions for large buildings were out of the question for him in England, but he set his hopes, to a certain extent, on the patronage accorded him by Prince Albert, as this gave him some prospects for the future. For the time being he contented himself with commissions to design decorations for interiors and luxurious furniture, for which he was well paid. He took to this work as seriously, from an artistic point of view, as if it had been a large building. We often met, and I also spent a few evenings at his house in Kensington, when we invariably dropped into the old vein of strange, serious humour that helped us to forget the seamy side of life. The report I was able to give of Semper after my return home did much to influence Sulzer in his successful attempt to get him over to Zurich to build the new Polytechnic.

On various occasions I also visited some not uninteresting theatres in London, strictly avoiding opera-houses, of course. I was most attracted by the little Adelphi Theatre in the Strand, and I frequently made Prager and Luders go with me. They acted some dramatised fairy-tales there under the title of Christmas. One of the performances interested me particularly because it consisted of a subtly connected conglomeration of the most familiar tales, played straight through, with no break at the end of the acts. It began with 'The Goose that laid the Golden Eggs,' and was transformed into 'The Three Wishes'; this passed into 'Red Riding Hood' (with the wolf changed into a cannibal who sang a very comical little couplet), and finished as 'Cinderella,' varied with other ingredients. These pieces were in every respect excellently mounted and played, and I gained a very good notion there of the imaginative fare in which the English people can find amusement. I found the performances at the Olympic Theatre less simple and innocent. Besides witty drawing-room pieces in the French style, which were very well played there, they acted fairy-tales such as the Yellow Dwarf, in which Hobson, an uncommonly popular actor, took the grotesque title-role. I saw the same actor again in a little comedy called Garrick Fever, in which he ends by representing a drunken man who, when people insisted on taking him for Garrick, undertook the part of Hamlet in this condition. I was greatly astonished by many audacities in his acting on this occasion.

A small out-of-the-way theatre in Marylebone was just then trying to attract the public by Shakespeare's plays. I attended a performance of the Merry Wives there, which really amazed me by its correctness and precision. Even a performance of Romeo and Juliet at the Haymarket Theatre impressed me favourably, in spite of the great inferiority of the company, on account of its accuracy and of the scenic arrangements, which were no doubt an inheritance from the Garrick tradition. But I still remember a curious illusion in connection with this: after the first act I told Luders, who was with me, how surprised I was at their giving the part of Romeo to an old man, whose age must at least be sixty, and who seemed anxious to retrieve his long-lost youth by laboriously adopting a sickly-sweet, feminine air. Luders looked at the programme again, and cried, 'Donnerwetter, it's a woman!' It was the once famous American, Miss Cushman.

In spite of every effort, I found it impossible to obtain a seat for Henry VIII at the Princess's Theatre. This play had been organised according to the new stage realism, and enjoyed an incredible vogue as a gorgeous spectacular piece, mounted with unusual care.

In the province of music, with which I was more concerned, I have still to mention several of the Sacred-Music Society's concerts, which I attended in the large room at Exeter Hall. The oratorios given there nearly every week have, it must be admitted, the advantage of the great confidence which arises from frequent repetition. Neither could I refuse to recognise the great precision of the chorus of seven hundred voices, which reached quite a respectable standard on a few occasions, particularly in Handel's Messiah. It was here that I came to understand the true spirit of English musical culture, which is bound up with the spirit of English Protestantism. This accounts for the fact that an oratorio attracts the public far more than an opera. A further advantage is secured by the feeling among the audience that an evening spent in listening to an oratorio may be regarded as a sort of service, and is almost as good as going to church. Every one in the audience holds a Handel piano score in the same way as one holds a prayer-book in church. These scores are sold at the box-office in shilling editions, and are followed most diligently—out of anxiety, it seemed to me, not to miss certain points solemnly enjoyed by the whole audience. For instance, at the beginning of the 'Hallelujah Chorus' it is considered proper for every one to rise from his seat. This movement, which probably originated in an expression of enthusiasm, is now carried out at each performance of the Messiah with painful precision.

All these recollections, however, are merged in the all-absorbing memory of almost uninterrupted ill-health, caused primarily, no doubt, by the state of the London climate at that season of the year, which is notorious all over the world. I had a perpetual cold, and I therefore followed the advice of my friends to take a heavy English diet by way of resisting the effect of the air, but this did not improve matters in the least. For one thing, I could not get my home sufficiently warmed through, and the work that I had brought with me was the first thing to suffer. The instrumentation of the Walkure, which I had hoped to finish off here, only advanced a paltry hundred pages. I was hindered in this principally by the circumstance that the sketches from which I had to work on the instrumentation had been written down without considering the extent to which a prolonged interruption of my working humour might affect the coherence of the sketch. How often did I sit before those pencilled pages as if they had been unfamiliar hieroglyphics which I was incapable of deciphering! In absolute despair I plunged into Dante, making for the first time a serious effort to read him. The Inferno, indeed, became a never-to-be-forgotten reality in that London atmosphere.

But at last came the hour of deliverance from even those evils which I had brought upon myself by my last assumption that I might be accepted, not to say wanted, in the great world. The sole consolation I had was in the deep emotion of my new friends when I took leave of them. I hurried home by way of Paris, which was clothed in its summer glory, and saw people really promenading again, instead of pushing through the streets on business. And so I returned to Zurich, full of cheerful impressions, on the 30th of June, my net profits being exactly one thousand francs.

My wife had an idea of taking up her sour-milk cure again on the Selisberg by Lake Lucerne, and as I thought mountain air would be good for my impaired health also, we decided to move there at once. Our project suffered a brief delay through the fatal illness of my dog Peps. As the result of old age in his thirteenth year, he suddenly exhibited such weakness that we became apprehensive of taking him up the Selisberg, for he could not have borne the fatigue of the ascent. In a few days his agony became alarmingly acute. He grew stupid, and had frequent convulsions, his only conscious act being to get up often from his bed (which was in my wife's room, as he was usually under her care) and stumble as far as my writing-table, where he sank down again in exhaustion. The veterinary surgeon said he could do no more, and as the convulsions gradually became terribly acute, I was advised to shorten the poor animal's cruel agony and free him from his pain by a little prussic acid. We delayed our departure on his account until I at last convinced myself that a quick death would be charity to the poor suffering creature, who was quite past all hope. I hired a boat, and took an hour's row across the lake to visit a young doctor of my acquaintance named Obrist, who had, I knew, come into possession of a village apothecary's stock, which included various poisons. From him I obtained a deadly dose, which I carried home across the lake in my solitary skiff on an exquisite summer evening. I was determined only to resort to this last expedient in case the poor brute were in extremity. He slept that last night as usual in his basket by my bedside, his invariable habit being to wake me with his paws in the morning. I was suddenly roused by his groans, caused by a particularly violent attack of convulsions; he then sank back without a sound; and I was so strangely moved by the significance of the moment that I immediately looked at my watch to impress on my memory the hour at which my extraordinarily devoted little friend died; it was ten minutes past one on the 10th of July. We devoted the next day to his burial, and shed bitter tears over him. Frau Stockar-Escher, our landlady, made over to us a pretty little plot in her garden, and there we buried him, with his basket and cushions. His grave was shown me many years after, but the last time I went to look at the little garden I found that everything had undergone an elegant transformation, and there were no longer any signs of Pep's grave.

At last we really started for the Selisberg, accompanied this time only by the new parrot—a substitute for good old Papo—from the Kreutzberg menagerie, which I had bought for my wife the year before. This one was a very good and intelligent bird also, but I left him entirely to Minna, treating him with invariable kindness, but never making a friend of him. Fortunately for us, our stay in the glorious air of this summer resort, of which we had grown very fond, was favoured by continuous fine weather. I devoted all my leisure, apart from my lonely walks, to making a fair copy of that part of the Walkure which was fully scored, and also took up my favourite reading again—the study of Schopenhauer. I had the pleasure of receiving a charming letter from Berlioz, together with Les Soirees de l'Orchestre, his new book, which I found inspiriting to read, although the author's taste for the grotesque was as foreign to me here as in his compositions. Here, too, I met young Robert von Hornstein again, who proved himself a pleasant and intelligent companion. I was particularly interested in his quick and evidently successful plunge into the study of Schopenhauer. He informed me that he proposed to settle for some time in Zurich, where Karl Ritter, too, had decided to take permanent winter quarters for his young wife and himself.

In the middle of August we returned to Zurich ourselves, and I was able to devote myself steadily to completing the instrumentation of the Walkure, while my relations with former acquaintances remained much the same. From outside I received news of the steady persistence with which my Tannhauser was, little by little, being propagated in German theatres. Lohengrin, too, followed in its steps, though without a first meeting with an entirely favourable reception. Franz Dingelstedt, who was at the time manager of the court theatre at Munich, undertook to introduce Tannhauser there, although, thanks to Lachner, the place was not prepossessed in my favour. He seemed to have managed it fairly well; its success, however, according to him, was not so great as to allow of my promised fee being punctually paid. But my income, owing to the conscientious stewardship of my friend Sulzer, was now sufficient to permit me to work without anxiety on that account. But I met with a new vexation when colder weather set in. I suffered from innumerable attacks of erysipelas during the whole winter, each fresh attack (in consequence of some tiny error of diet, or of the least cold) being attended by violent pain. It was obviously the result of the ill effects of the London climate. What pained me most was the frequent interruption of my work on this account. The most I could do was to read when the illness was taking its course. Burnouff's Introduction a l'Histoire du Bouddhisme interested me most among my books, and I found material in it for a dramatic poem, which has stayed in my mind ever since, though only vaguely sketched. I may still perhaps work it out. I gave it the title of Die Sieger. It was founded on the simple legend of a Tschantala girl, who is received into the dignified order of beggars known as Clakyamouni, and, through her exceedingly passionate and purified love for Ananda, the chief disciple of Buddha, herself gains merit. Besides the underlying beauty of this simple material, a curious relation between it and the subsequent development of my musical experience influenced my selection. For to the mind of Buddha the past life (in a former incarnation) of every being who appears before him stands revealed as plainly as the present; and this simple story has its significance, as showing that the past life of the suffering hero and heroine is bound up with the immediate present in this life. I saw at once that the continuous reminiscence in the music of this double existence might perfectly well be presented to the emotions, and I decided accordingly to keep in prospect the working out of this poem as a particularly congenial task.

I had thus two new subjects stamped on my imagination, Tristan and Die Sieger; with these I was constantly occupied from this time onwards, together with my great work, the Nibelungen, the unfinished portion of which was still of gigantic dimensions. The more these projects absorbed me, the more did I writhe with impatience at the perpetual interruptions of my work by these loathsome attacks of illness. About this time Liszt proposed to pay me a visit that had been postponed in the summer, but I had to ask him not to come, as I could not be certain, after my late experiences, of not being tied to a sick-bed during the few days he would be able to give me. Thus I spent the winter, calm and resigned in my productive moments, but moody and irritable towards the outside world, and consequently a source of some anxiety to my friends. I was glad, however, when Karl Ritter's arrival in Zurich allowed him to become more intimate with me again. By his selecting Zurich as a settled home, for the winter months, at any rate, he showed his devotion to me in a way that did me good, and wiped out more than one bad impression. Hornstein had actually managed to come too, but could not stay. He declared he was so nervous that he could not touch a note of the piano, and made no attempt to deny that the fact of his mother's having died insane made him very much afraid of going mad himself. Although this in a way made him interesting, his intellectual gifts were marred by such weakness of character, that we were soon reduced to thinking him fairly hopeless, and we were not inconsolable when he suddenly left Zurich.

My circle had gained considerably of late by the addition of a new acquaintance, Gottfried Keller, a native of Zurich, who had just returned to the welcoming arms of his affectionate fellow-townsmen from Germany, where his writings had brought him some fame. Several of his works—in particular, a longish novel, Der Grune Heinrich—had been recommended to me in favourable though not exaggerated terms by Sulzer. I was therefore surprised to find him a person of extraordinarily shy and awkward demeanour. Every one felt anxious about his prospects on first becoming acquainted with him, and it was indeed this question of his future that was the difficulty. Although everything he wrote showed great original talent, it was obvious at once that they were merely efforts in the direction of artistic development, and the inevitable inquiry arose as to what was to follow and really establish his fame. I kept continually asking him what he was going to do next. In reply he would mention all sorts of fully matured schemes, which would none of them hold water on closer acquaintance. Luckily a government post was eventually found for him (from patriotic considerations, it seemed),—where he no doubt did good service, although his literary activity seemed to lie fallow after his early efforts.

Herwegh, another friend of longer standing, was less fortunate. I had worried myself for a long time about him too, trying to think that his previous efforts were merely introductions to really serious artistic achievements. He admitted himself that he felt his best was still to come. It seemed to him that he had all the material—crowds of 'ideas'—in reserve for a great poetical work; there was nothing wanting but the 'frame' in which he could paint it all, and this is what he hoped, from day to day, to find. As I grew tired of waiting for it, I set about trying to find the longed-for frame for him myself. He evidently wished to evolve an epic poem on a large scale, in which to embody the views he had acquired. As he had once alluded to Dante's luck in finding a subject like the pilgrimage through hell and purgatory into paradise, it occurred to me to suggest, for the desired frame, the Brahman myth of Metempsychosis, which in Plato's version comes within reach of our classical education. He did not think it a bad idea, and I accordingly took some trouble to define the form such a poem would take. He was to decide upon three acts, each containing three songs, which would make nine songs in all. The first act would show his hero in the Asiatic country of his birth; the second, his reincarnation in Greece and Rome; the third, his reincarnation in the Middle Ages and in modern times. All this pleased him very much, and he thought, it might come to something. Not so my cynical friend, Dr. Wille, who had an estate in the country where we often met in the bosom of his family. He was of opinion that we expected far too much of Herwegh. Viewed at close quarters he was, after all, only a young Swabian who had received a far larger share of honour and glory than his abilities warranted, through the Jewish halo thrown around him by his wife. In the end I had to shrug my shoulders in silent acquiescence with these hopelessly unkind remarks, as I could, of course, see poor Herwegh sinking into deeper apathy every year, until in the end he seemed incapable of doing anything.

Semper's arrival in Zurich, which had at last taken place, enlivened our circle considerably. The Federal authorities had asked me to use my influence with Semper to induce him to accept a post as teacher at the Federal Polytechnic. Semper came over at once to have a look at the establishment first, and was favourably impressed with everything. He even found cause for delight, when out walking, in the unclipped trees, 'where one might light upon a caterpillar again,' he said, and decided definitely to migrate to Zurich, and thus brought himself and his family permanently into my circle of acquaintance. True, he had small prospect of commissions for large buildings, and considered himself doomed to play the schoolmaster for ever. He was, however, in the throes of writing a great work on art, which, after various mishaps and a change of publisher, he brought out later under the title, Der Styl. I often found him engaged with the drawings for illustrating this book; he drew them himself very neatly on stone, and grew so fond of the work that he declared the smallest detail in his drawing interested him far more than the big clumsy architectural jobs.

From this time forward, in accordance with my manifesto, I would have nothing whatever to do with the 'Musikgesellschaft,' neither did I ever conduct a public performance in Zurich again. The members of this society could not at first be brought to believe that I was in earnest, and I was obliged to bring it home to them by a categorical explanation, in which I dwelt on their slackness and their disregard of my urgent proposals for the establishment of a decent orchestra. The excuse I invariably received was, that although there was money enough among the musical public, yet every one fought shy of heading the subscription list with a definite sum, because of the tiresome notoriety they would win among the towns-people. My old friend, Herr Ott-Imhof, assured me that it would not embarrass him in the least to pay ten thousand francs a year to a cause of that sort, but that from that moment every one would demand why he was spending his income in that way. It would rouse such a commotion that he might easily be brought to account about the administration of his property. This called to my mind Goethe's exclamation at the beginning of his Erste Schweizer Briefe. So my musical activities at Zurich ceased definitely from that time.

[Footnote: This doubtless refers to the following passage: 'And the Swiss call themselves free! These smug bourgeois shut up in their little towns, these poor devils on their precipices and rocks, call themselves free! Is there any limit at all to what one can make people believe and cherish, provided that one preserves the old fable of "Freedom" in spirits of wine for them? Once upon a time they rid themselves of a tyrant and thought themselves free. Then, thanks to the glorious sun, a singular transformation occurred, and out of the corpse of their late oppressor a host of minor tyrants arose. Now they continue to relate the old fable; on all sides it is drummed into one's ears ad nauseam—they have thrown off the yoke of the despot and have remained free. And there they are, ensconsed behind their walls and imprisoned in their customs, their laws, the opinion of their neighbours, and their Philistine suburbanism' (Goethe's Werke, Briefe aus der Schweiz, Erste Abteilung.)—Editor]

On the other hand, I occasionally had music at home. Neat and precious copies of Klindworth's pianoforte score of Rheingold, as well as of some acts of the Walkure, lay ready to hand, and Baumgartner was the first who was set down to see what he could make of the atrociously difficult arrangement. Later on we found that Theodor Kirchner, a musician who had settled at Winterthur and frequently visited Zurich, was better able to play certain bits of the pianoforte score. The wife of Heim, the head of the Glee Society, with whom we were both on friendly terms, was pressed into the service to sing the parts for female voices when I attempted to play some of the vocal parts. She had a really fine voice and a warm tone, and had been the only soloist at the big performances in 1853; only she was thoroughly unmusical, and I had hard work to make her keep in tune, and it was even more difficult to get the time right. Still, we achieved something, and my friends had an occasional foretaste of my Nibelungen music.

But I had to exercise great moderation here too, as every excitement threatened to bring on a return of erysipelas. A little party of us were at Karl Ritter's one evening, when I hit upon the idea of reading aloud Hoffmann's Der Goldene Topf. I did not notice that the room was getting gradually cooler, but before I had finished my reading I found myself, to every one's horror, with a swollen, red nose, and had to trail laboriously home to tend the malady, which exhausted me terribly every time. During these periods of suffering I became more and more absorbed in developing the libretto of Tristan, whereas my intervals of convalescence were devoted to the score of the Walkure, at which I toiled diligently but laboriously, completing the fair copy in March of that year (1856). But my illness and the strain of work had reduced me to a state of unusual irritability, and I can remember how extremely bad-tempered I was when our friends the Wesendoncks came in that evening to pay a sort of congratulatory visit on the completion of my score. I expressed my opinion of this way of sympathising with my work with such extraordinary bitterness that the poor insulted visitors departed abruptly in great consternation, and it took many explanations, which I had great difficulty in making, to atone for the insult as the days went on. My wife came out splendidly on this occasion in her efforts to smooth things over. A special tie between her and our friends had been formed by the introduction of a very friendly little dog into our house, which had been obtained by the Wesendoncks as a successor to my good old Peps. He proved such a good and ingratiating animal that he soon gained my wife's tender affection, while I, too, always felt very kindly towards him. This time I left the choice of a name to my wife, however, and she invented, apparently as a pendant to Peps, the name Fips, which I was quite willing for him to have. But he was always more my wife's friend, as, despite my great sense of justice, which made me recognise the excellence of these animals, I never was able to become so attached to them as to Peps and Papo.

About the time of my birthday I had a visit from my old friend Tichatschek of Dresden, who remained faithful to his devotion and enthusiasm for me—as far as so uncultured a person was capable of such emotions. On the morning of my birthday I was awakened in a touching way by the strains of my beloved Adagio from Beethoven's E minor Quartette. My wife had invited the musicians in whom I took a special interest for this occasion, and they had, with subtle delicacy, chosen the very piece of which I had once spoken with such great emotion. At our party in the evening Tichatschek sang several things from Lohengrin, and really amazed us all by the brilliancy of voice he still preserved. He had also succeeded, by perseverance, in overcoming the irresolution of the Dresden management, due to their subserviency to the court, with regard to further performances of my operas. They were now being given there again, with great success and to full houses. I took a slight cold on an excursion which we made with our visitor to Brunnen on Lake Lucerne, and thus brought on my thirteenth attack of erysipelas. One of the terrible southern gales, which make it impossible to heat the rooms at Brunnen, made my sufferings this time more acute, added to the fact that I went through with the excursion, in spite of my painful condition, rather than spoil our guest's pleasure by turning back sooner. I was still in bed when Tichatschek left, and I decided at least to try a change of air in the south, because this dreadful malady seemed to me to haunt the locality of Zurich. I chose the Lake of Geneva, and decided to look out for a well-situated country resort in the neighbourhood of Geneva or thereabouts, where I could start on a cure which my Zurich doctor had prescribed. I therefore started for Geneva in the beginning of June. Fips, who was to accompany me into my rural retreat, caused me great anxiety on the journey; I nearly changed my destination, on account of an attempt to dislodge him from my carriage in the train for part of the journey. It was thanks to the energetic way in which I carried my point that I started my cure at Geneva, as I should otherwise probably have gone in a different direction.

In Geneva I put up first at the familiar old Hotel de l'Ecu de Geneve, which called up various reminiscences to my mind. Here I consulted Dr. Coindet, who sent me to Mornex on Mont Saleve, for the sake of its good air, and recommended me a pension. My first thought on arrival was to find a place where I should be undisturbed, and I persuaded the lady who kept the pension to make over to me an isolated pavilion in the garden which consisted of one large reception-room. Much persuasion was needed, as all the boarders—precisely the people I wished to avoid—were indignant at having the room originally intended for their social gatherings taken away. But at last I secured my object, though I had to bind myself to vacate my drawing-room on Sunday mornings, because it was then stocked with benches and arranged for a service, which seemed to mean a good deal to the Calvinists among the boarders. I fell in with this quite happily, and made my sacrifice honourably the very first Sunday by betaking myself to Geneva to read the papers. The next day, however, my hostess informed me that the boarders were very annoyed at only being able to hold the service, and not the week-day games in my drawing-room. I was given notice, and looked round for other quarters, which I found in the house of a neighbour.

This neighbour was a Dr. Vaillant, who had taken an equally fine site on which to erect a hydropathic institute. I first made inquiries about warm baths, as my Zurich doctor had advised the use of these with sulphur, but there was no prospect of obtaining any such thing. Dr. Vaillant'a whole manner pleased me so much, however, that I told him my troubles. When I asked him which of two things I should drink: hot sulphur bath-water or a certain stinking mineral water, he smiled and said: 'Monsieur, vous n'etes que nerveux. All this will only excite you more; you merely need calming. If you will entrust yourself to me, I promise that you will have so far recovered by the end of two months as never to have erysipelas again.' And he kept his word.

I certainly formed a very different opinion of hydrotherapic methods through this excellent doctor from any I could have acquired from the 'Water Jew' of Albisbrunnen and other raw amateurs. Vaillant had been famous as a doctor in Paris itself (Lablache and Rossini had consulted him), but he had the misfortune of becoming paralysed in both legs, and after four years of helpless misery, during which he lost his whole practice and sank into utter misery, he came across the original Silesian hydropathologist, Priessnitz, to whom he was conveyed, with the result that he recovered completely. There he learned the method that had proved so effective, refined it from all the brutalities of its inventor, and tried to recommend himself to the Parisians by building a hydro at Meudon. But he met with no encouragement. His former patients, whom he tried to persuade into visiting his institution, merely asked whether there was dancing there in the evening. He found it impossible to keep it up, and it is to this circumstance that I owe my meeting with him there, near Geneva, where he was once more trying to exploit his cure in a practical way. He laid claim to attention, if only by the fact that he strictly limited the number of patients he took into his house, insisting that a doctor could only be responsible for the right application and success of his treatment by being in a position to observe his patients minutely at all hours of the day. The advantage of his system, which benefited me so wonderfully, was the thoroughly calming effect of the treatment, which consisted in the most ingenious use of water at a moderate temperature.

Besides this, Vaillant took a special pleasure in satisfying my wants, particularly in procuring me rest and quiet. For instance, my presence at the common breakfast, which I found exciting and inconvenient, was excused, and I was allowed to make tea in my own room instead. This was an unaccustomed treat for me, and I indulged in it, under cover of secrecy, to excess, usually drinking tea behind closed doors for two hours, while I read Walter Scott's novels, after the fatiguing exertions of my morning cure. I had found some cheap and good French translations of these novels in Geneva, and had brought a whole pile of them to Mornex. They were admirably suited to my routine, which prohibited serious study or work; but, apart from that, I now fully endorsed Schopenhauer's high opinion of this poet's value, of which I had till then been doubtful. On my solitary strolls, it is true, I generally took a volume of Byron with me, because I possessed a miniature edition, to read on some mountain height with a view of Mont Blanc, but I soon left it at home, for I realised that I hardly ever drew it from my pocket.

The only work I permitted myself was the sketching of plans for building myself a house. These, in the end, I tried to work out correctly with all the materials of an architect's draughtsman. I had risen to this bold idea after negotiations on which I entered about that time with Hartel, the music publishers at Leipzig, for the sale of my Nibelungen compositions. I demanded forty thousand francs on the spot for the four works, of which half was to be paid me when the building of the house began. The publishers really seemed so far favourably inclined towards my proposals as to make my undertaking possible.

Very soon, however, their opinion of the market value of my works underwent an unhappy change. I could never make out whether this was the result of their having only just examined my poem carefully and decided that it was impracticable, or whether influence had been brought to bear on them from the same quarter to which the opposition directed against most of my undertakings could be traced, and which grew more and more evident as time wore on. Be that as it may, the hope of earning capital for my house-building forsook me; but my architectural studies took their course, and I made it my aim to obtain means to fulfil them.

As the two months I had destined to Dr. Vaillant's treatment were up on the 15th of August, I left the resort which had proved so beneficial, and went straight off on a visit to Karl Ritter, who, with his wife, had taken a lovely and very unassuming little house near Lausanne for the summer months. Both of them had visited me at Mornex, but when I tried to induce Karl to have some cold-water treatment, he declared, after one trial, that even the most soothing method excited him. On the whole, though, we found a good number of agreeable topics to discuss, and he told me he would return to Zurich in the autumn.

I returned home in a fairly good humour with Fips, on whose account I travelled by mail-coach to avoid the obnoxious railway journey. My wife, too, had returned home from her sour-milk cure on the Selisberg, and in addition I found my sister Clara installed, the only one of my relatives who had visited me in my Swiss retreat. We at once made an excursion with her to my favourite spot, Brunnen on Lake Lucerne, and spent an exquisite evening there enjoying the glorious sunset and other beautiful effects of the Alpine landscape. At night-fall, when the moon rose full over the lake, it turned out that a very pretty and effective ovation had been arranged for me (I had been a frequent visitor there) by our enthusiastic and attentive host, Colonel Auf-der-Mauer. Two boats, illuminated by coloured lanterns, came up to the beach facing our hotel, bearing the Brunnen brass band, which was formed entirely of amateurs from the countryside. With Federal staunchness, and without any attempts at punctilious unison, they proceeded to play some of my compositions in a loud and irrefutable manner. They then paid me homage in a little speech, and I replied heartily, after which there was much gripping of all sorts of horny hands on my part, as we drank a few bottles of wine on the beach. For years afterwards I never passed this beach on very frequent visits without receiving a friendly handshake or a greeting. I was generally in doubt as to what the particular boatman wanted of me, but it always turned out that I was dealing with one of the brass bandsmen whose good intentions had been manifested on that pleasant evening.

My sister Clara's lengthy stay with us at Zurich enlivened our family circle very pleasantly. She was the musical one among my brothers and sisters, and I enjoyed her society very much. It was also a relief to me when her presence acted as a damper upon the various household scenes brought on by Minna, who, as a result of the steady development of her heart trouble, grew more and more suspicious, vehement and obstinate.

In October I expected a visit from Liszt, who proposed to make a fairly long stay at Zurich, accompanied by various people of note. I could not wait so long, however, before beginning the composition of Siegfried, and I began to sketch the overture on the 22nd of September.

A tinker had established himself opposite our house, and stunned my ears all day long with his incessant hammering. In my disgust at never being able to find a detached house protected from every kind of noise, I was on the point of deciding to give up composing altogether until the time when this indispensable condition should be fulfilled. But it was precisely my rage over the tinker that, in a moment of agitation, gave me the theme for Siegfried's furious outburst against the bungling Mime. I played over the childishly quarrelsome Polter theme in G minor to my sister, furiously singing the words at the same time, which made us all laugh so much that I decided to make one more effort. This resulted in my writing down a good part of the first scene by the time Liszt arrived on 13th October.

Liszt came by himself, and my house at once became a musical centre. He had finished his Faust and Dante Symphonies since I had seen him, and it was nothing short of marvellous to hear him play them to me on the piano from the score. As I felt sure that Liszt must be convinced of the great impression his compositions made on me, I felt no scruples in persuading him to alter the mistaken ending of the Dante Symphony. If anything had convinced me of the man's masterly and poetical powers of conception, it was the original ending of the Faust Symphony, in which the delicate fragrance of a last reminiscence of Gretchen overpowers everything, without arresting the attention by a violent disturbance. The ending of the Dante Symphony seemed to me to be quite on the same lines, for the delicately introduced Magnificat in the same way only gives a hint of a soft, shimmering Paradise. I was the more startled to hear this beautiful suggestion suddenly interrupted in an alarming way by a pompous, plagal cadence which, as I was told, was supposed to represent Domenico.

'No!' I exclaimed loudly, 'not that! Away with it! No majestic Deity! Leave us the fine soft shimmer.'

'You are right,' said Liszt. 'I said so too; it was the Princess who persuaded me differently. But it shall be as you wish.'

All well and good—but all the greater was my distress to learn later that not only had this ending of the Dante Symphony been preserved, but even the delicate ending of the Faust Symphony, which had appealed to me so particularly, had been changed, in a manner better calculated to produce an effect, by the introduction of a chorus. And this was exactly typical of my relations to Liszt and to his friend Caroline Wittgenstein!

This woman, with her daughter Marie, was soon to arrive on a visit too, and the necessary preparations were made for her reception. But before these ladies arrived, a most painful incident occurred between Liszt and Karl Ritter at my house. Ritter's looks alone, and still more, a certain abrupt contradictoriness in his way of speaking, seemed to put Liszt into a state in which he was easily irritated. One evening Liszt was speaking in an impressive tone of the merits of the Jesuits, and Ritter's inopportune smiles appeared to offend him. At table the conversation turned on the Emperor of the French, Louis Napoleon, whose merits Liszt rather summarily insisted that we should acknowledge, whereas we were, on the whole, anything but enthusiastic about the general state of affairs in France. When Liszt, in an attempt to make clear the important influence of France on European culture, mentioned as an instance the French Academie, Karl again indulged in his fatal smile. This exasperated Liszt beyond all bounds, and in his reply he included some such phrase as this: 'If we are not prepared to admit this, what do we prove ourselves to be? Baboons!' I laughed, but again Karl only smiled—this time, with deadly embarrassment. I discovered afterwards through Bulow that in some youthful squabble he had had the word 'Baboon-face' hurled at him. It soon became impossible to hide the fact that Ritter felt himself grossly insulted by 'the doctor,' as he called him, and he left my house foaming with rage, not to set foot in it again for years. After a few days I received a letter in which he demanded, first, a complete apology from Liszt, as soon as he came to see me again, and if this were unobtainable, Liszt's exclusion from my house. It distressed me greatly to receive, soon after this, a letter from Ritter's mother, whom I respected very much, reproaching me for my unjust treatment of her son in not having obtained satisfaction for an insult offered him in my house. For a long time my relations with this family, intimate as they had been, were painfully strained, as I found it impossible to make them see the incident in the right light. When Liszt, after a time, heard of it, he regretted the disturbance too, and with praise-worthy magnanimity made the first advance towards a reconciliation by paying Ritter a friendly visit. There was nothing said about the incident, and Ritter's return visit was made, not to Liszt, but to the Princess, who had arrived in the meantime. After this Liszt decided that he could do nothing further; Ritter, therefore, withdrew from our society from this time forward, and changed his winter quarters from Zurich to Lausanne, where he settled permanently.

Not only my own modest residence, but the whole of Zurich seemed full of life when Princess Caroline and her daughter took up their abode at the Hotel Baur for a time. The curious spell of excitement which this lady immediately threw over every one she succeeded in drawing into her circle amounted, in the case of my good sister Clara (who was still with us at the time), almost to intoxication. It was as if Zurich had suddenly become a metropolis. Carriages drove hither and thither, footmen ushered one in and out, dinners and suppers poured in upon us, and we found ourselves suddenly surrounded by an increasing number of interesting people, whose existence at Zurich we had never even suspected, though they now undoubtedly cropped up everywhere. A musician named Winterberger, who felt it incumbent on him on certain occasions to behave eccentrically, had been brought there by Liszt; Kirchner, the Schumann enthusiast from Winterthur, was practically always there, attracted by the new life, and he too did not fail to play the wag. But it was principally the professors of Zurich University whom Princess Caroline coaxed out of their hole-and-corner Zurich habits. She would have them, one at a time, for herself, and again serve them up en masse for us. If I looked in for a moment from my regular midday walk, the lady would be dining alone, now with Semper, now with Professor Kochly, then with Moleschott, and so on. Even my very peculiar friend Sulzer was drawn in, and, as he could not deny, in a manner intoxicated. But a really refreshing sense of freedom and spontaneity pervaded everything, and the unceremonious evenings at my house in particular were really remarkably free and easy. On these occasions the Princess, with Polish patriarchal friendliness, would help the mistress of the house in serving. Once, after we had had some music, I had to give the substance of my two newly conceived poems, Tristan und Isolde and Die Sieger, to a group which, half sitting, half lying before me, was certainly not without charm.

The crown of our festivities was, however, Liszt's birthday, on the 22nd October, which the Princess celebrated with due pomp at her own house. Every one who was some one at Zurich was there. A poem by Hoffmann von Fallersleben was telegraphed from Weimar, and at the Princess's request was solemnly read aloud by Herwegh in a strangely altered voice. I then gave a performance, with Frau Heim, of the first act, and a scene from the second, of the Walkure, Liszt accompanying. I was able to obtain a favourable idea of the effect of our performance by the wish expressed by Dr. Wille to hear these things badly done, so that he could form a correct judgment, as he feared he might be seduced by the excellence of our execution. Besides these, Liszt's Symphonic Poems were played on two grand pianos. At the feast, a dispute arose about Heinrich Heine, with respect to whom Liszt made all sorts of insidious remarks. Frau Wesendonck responded by asking if he did not think Heine's name as a poet would, nevertheless, be inscribed in the temple of immortality.

'Yes, but in mud,' answered Liszt quickly, creating, as may be conceived, a great sensation.

Unfortunately, our circle was soon to suffer a great loss by Liszt's illness—a skin eruption—which confined him to his bed for a considerable period. As soon as he was a little better, we quickly went to the piano again to try over by ourselves my two finished scores of Rheingold and the Walkure. Princess Marie listened carefully, and was even able to make intelligent suggestions in connection with a few difficult passages in the poem.

Princess Caroline, too, seemed to set extraordinary store on being quite clear as to the actual intrigue concerning the fate of the gods in my Nibelungen. She took me in hand one day, quite like one of the Zurich professors, en particulier, to clear up this point to her satisfaction. I must confess it was irrefutably brought home to me that she was anxious to understand the most delicate and mysterious features of the intrigue, though in rather too precise and matter-of-fact a spirit. In the end I felt as though I had explained a French society play to her. Her high spirits in all such things were as marked as the curious amiability of her nature in other respects; for when I one day explained to her, in illustration of the first of these two qualities, that four weeks of uninterrupted companionship with her would have been the death of me, she laughed heartily. I had reason for sadness in the changes which I realised had taken place in her daughter Marie; in the three years since I had first seen her she had faded to an extraordinary extent. If I then called her a 'child,' I could not now properly describe her as a 'young woman.' Some disastrous experience seemed to have made her prematurely old. It was only when she was excited, especially in the evening when she was with friends, that the attractive and radiant side of her nature asserted itself to a marked extent. I remember one fine evening at Herwegh's, when Liszt was moved to the same state of enthusiasm by a grand-piano abominably out of tune, as by the disgusting cigars to which at that time he was more passionately devoted than to the finer brands. We were all compelled to exchange our belief in magic for a belief in actual witchcraft as we listened to his wonderful phantasies on this pianoforte. To my great horror, Liszt still gave evidence on more than one occasion of an irritability which was thoroughly bad-tempered and even quarrelsome, such as had already manifested itself in the unfortunate scene with young Ritter. For instance, it was dangerous, especially in the presence of Princess Caroline, to praise Goethe. Even Liszt and myself had nearly quarrelled (for which he seemed to be very eager) over the character of Egmont, which he thought it his duty to depreciate because the man allows himself to be taken in by Alba. I had been warned, and had the presence of mind to confine myself to observing the peculiar physiology of my friend on this occasion, and turning my attention to his condition, much more than to the subject of our dispute. We never actually came to blows; but from this time forward I retained throughout my life a vague feeling that we might one day come to such an encounter, in which case it would not fail to be terrific. Perhaps it was just this feeling that acted as a check on me whenever any opportunity arose for heated argument. Goodness knows that I myself had a bad enough reputation with my friends for my own irritability and sudden outbursts of temper!

After I had made a stay of more than six weeks, we had a final opportunity for coming together again before my return from this visit that had meant so much for me. We had agreed to spend a week at St. Gall, where we had an invitation from Schadrowsky, a young musical director, to give our support to a society concert in that district.

We stayed together at the Hecht inn, and the Princess entertained us as if she had been in her own house. She gave me and my wife a room next her own private apartment. Unfortunately a most trying night was in store for us. Princess Caroline had one of her severe nervous attacks, and in order to preclude the approach of the painful hallucination by which she was tormented at such times, her daughter Marie was obliged to read to her all through the night in a voice deliberately raised a good deal above its natural pitch. I got fearfully excited, especially at what appeared to be an inexplicable disregard for the peace of one's neighbour implied by such conduct. At two o'clock in the morning I leaped out of bed, rang the bell continuously until the waiter awoke, and asked him to take me to a bedroom in one of the remotest parts of the inn. We moved there and then, not without attracting the attention of our neighbours, upon whom, however, the circumstance made no impression. The next morning I was much astonished to see Marie appear as usual, quite unembarrassed, and without showing the least traces of anything exceptional having occurred. I now learned that everybody connected with the Princess was thoroughly accustomed to such disturbances. Here, too, the house soon filled with all sorts of guests: Herwegh and his wife came, Dr. Wille and his wife, Kirchner, and several others, and before long our life in the Hecht yielded nothing, in point of activity, to our life in the Hotel Baur. The excuse for all this, as I have said, was the society concert of the musical club of St. Gall. At the rehearsal, to my genuine delight, Liszt impressed two of his compositions, Orpheus and the Prelude, upon the orchestra with complete success, in spite of the limited resources at his command. The performance turned out to be a really fine one, and full of spirit. I was especially delighted with the Orpheus and with the finely proportioned orchestral work, to which I had always assigned a high place of honour among Liszt's compositions. On the other hand, the special favour of the public was awarded to the Prelude, of which the greater part was encored. I conducted the Eroica Symphony of Beethoven under very painful conditions, as I always caught cold on such occasions, and generally became feverish afterwards. My conception and rendering of Beethoven's work made a powerful impression upon Liszt, whose opinion was the only one which had any real weight with me. We watched each other over our work with a closeness and sympathy that was genuinely instructive. At night we had to take part in a little supper in our honour, which was the occasion for expressing the noble and deep sentiments of the worthy citizens of St. Gall concerning the significance of our visit. As I was regaled with a most complimentary panegyric by a poet, it was necessary for me to respond with equal seriousness and eloquence. In his dithyrambic enthusiasm, Liszt went so far as to suggest a general clinking of glasses, signifying approval of his suggestion that the new theatre of St. Gall should be opened with a model performance of Lohengrin. No one offered any objection. The next day, the 24th of November, we all met, for various festivities, in the house of an ardent lover of music, Herr Bourit, a rich merchant of St. Gall. Here we had some pianoforte music, and Liszt played to us, among other things, the great Sonata of Beethoven in B flat major, at the close of which Kirchner dryly and candidly remarked, 'Now we can truly say that we have witnessed the impossible, for I shall always regard what I have just heard as an impossibility.' On this occasion, attention was called to the twentieth anniversary of my marriage with Minna, which fell on this day, and after the wedding music of Lohengrin had been played, we formed a charming procession a la Polonaise through the various rooms.

In spite of all these pleasant experiences, I should have been well content to see the end of the business and return to the peace of my home in Zurich. The indisposition of the Princess, however, retarded the departure of my friends for Germany for several days, and we found ourselves compelled to remain together in a state of nervous tension and aimlessness for some time, until at last, on the 27th November, I escorted my visitors to Rorschach, and took my leave of them there on the steamer. Since then I have never seen the Princess or her daughter, nor I think it likely I shall ever meet them again.

It was not without some misgiving that I took leave of my friends, for the Princess was really ill, and Liszt seemed to be much exhausted. I recommended their immediate return to Weimar, and told them to take care of themselves. Great was my surprise, therefore, when before long I received the news that they were making a sojourn of some duration in Munich. This followed immediately upon their departure, and was also attended with much noisy festivity and occasional artistic gatherings. I was thus led to the conclusion that it was foolish of me to recommend people with such constitutions either to do a thing or to abstain from doing it. I, for my part, returned home to Zurich very much exhausted, unable to sleep, and tormented by the frosty weather at this cold season of the year. I was afraid that I had by my recent method of life subjected myself to a fresh attack of erysipelas. I was very pleased when I awoke the next morning to discover no trace of what I feared, and from that day I continued to sing the praises of my excellent Dr. Vaillant wherever I went. By the beginning of December I had so far recovered as to be able to resume the composition of Siegfried. Thus I again entered upon my orderly method of life, with all its insignificance as far as outward things were concerned: work, long walks, the perusal of books, evenings spent with some friend or other of the domestic circle. The only thing that worried me was the regret I still felt for my quarrel with Ritter, in consequence of the unhappy contre-temps with Liszt. I now lost touch entirely with this young friend, who in so many ways had endeared himself to me. Before the close of the winter he left Zurich without seeing me again.

During the months of January and February (1857) I completed the first act of Siegfried, writing down the composition in full to take the place of the earlier rough pencil draft, and immediately set to work on the orchestration; but I probably carried out Vaillant's instructions with too much zeal. Pursued by the fear of a possible return of erysipelas, I sought to ward it off by a repeated and regular process of sweating once a week, wrapped up in towels, on the hydropathic system. By this means I certainly escaped the dreaded evil, but the effort exhausted me very much, and I longed for the return of the warm weather, when I should be relieved from the severities of this treatment.

It was now that the tortures inflicted upon me by noisy and musical neighbours began to increase in intensity. Apart from the tinker, whom I hated with a deadly hatred, and with whom I had a terrible scene about once a week, the number of pianos in the house where I lived was augmented. The climax came with the arrival of a certain Herr Stockar, who played the flute in the room under mine every Sunday, whereupon I gave up all hope of composing any more. One day my friends the Wesendoncks, who had returned from wintering in Paris, unfolded to me a most welcome prospect of the fulfilment of my ardent wishes in regard to my future place of abode. Wesendonck had already had an idea of having a small house built for me on a site I was to select for myself. My own plans, elaborated with a deceptive skill, had been already submitted to an architect. But the acquisition of a suitable plot of land was and still remained a great difficulty. In my walks I had long had my eye on a little winter residence in the district of Enge, on the ridge of the hill that separates the Lake of Zurich from Sihlthal. It was called Lavater Cottage, as it had belonged to that famous phrenologist, and he had been in the habit of staying there regularly. I had enlisted the services of my friend Hagenbuch, the Cantonal Secretary, to use all his influence to secure me a few acres of land at this spot as cheaply as possible. But herein lay the great difficulty. The piece of land I required consisted of various lots attached to larger estates, and it turned out that in order to acquire my one plot it would have been necessary to buy out a large number of different owners. I put the difficulties of my case before Wesendonck, and gradually created in him a desire to purchase this wide tract of land, and lay out a fine site containing a large villa for his own family. The idea was that I should also have a plot there. However, the demands made upon my friend in regard to the preliminaries and to the building of his house, which was to be on a scale both generous and dignified, were too many, and he also thought the enclosure of two families within the same confines might lead in time to inconveniences on both sides. There happened to be an unpretentious little country house with a garden which I had admired, and which was only separated from his estate by a narrow carriage drive; and this Wesendonck decided to buy for me. I rejoiced beyond measure when I heard of his intention. The shock experienced by the over-cautious buyer was consequently all the greater when one day be discovered that the present owner, with whom he had negotiated in too timid a fashion, had just sold his piece of land to somebody else. Luckily it turned out that the buyer was a mental specialist, whose sole intention in making the purchase was to instal himself with his lunatic asylum by the side of my friend. This information awakened the most terrible anticipations in Wesendonck, and put the utmost strain upon his energy. He now gave instructions that this piece of land must be acquired at any price from the unfortunate specialist. Thus, after many vexatious vicissitudes, it came into the possession of my friend, who had to pay pretty heavily for it. He allowed me to come into possession at Easter of this year, charging me the same rent as I had paid for my lodging in the Zeltweg, that is to say, eight hundred francs a year.

Our installation in this house, which occupied me heart and soul at the beginning of the spring, was not achieved without many a disappointment. The cottage, which had only been designed for use in summer, had to be made habitable for the winter by putting in heating apparatus and various other necessaries. It is true, that most of the essentials in this respect were carried out by the proprietor; but no end of difficulties remained to be solved. There was not a single thing upon which my wife and I did not constantly differ, and my position as an ordinary middle-class man without a brass farthing of my own made matters no easier. With regard to my finances, however, events took place from time to time which were well calculated to inspire a sanguine temperament with trustful confidence in the future. In spite of the bad performances of my operas, Tannhauser brought me unexpectedly good royalties from Berlin. From Vienna, too, I obtained the wherewithal to give me breathing-space in a most curious way. I was still excluded from the Royal Opera, and I had been assured that so long as there was an imperial court, I was not to dream of a performance of my seditious works in Vienna. This strange state of affairs inspired my old director, Hoffmann of Riga, now director of the Josephstadt Theatre, to venture on the production of Tannhauser with a special opera company, in a summer theatre built by himself on the Lerchenfeld outside the boundary of Vienna. He offered me for every performance which I would license a royalty of a hundred francs. When Liszt, whom I informed of the matter, thought this offer was suspicious, I wrote and told him that I proposed to follow Mirabeau's example with regard to it. Mirabeau, when he failed to be elected by his peers to the assembly of Notables, addressed himself to the electors of Marseilles in the capacity of a linen-draper. This pleased Liszt; and, indeed, I now made my way, by means of the summer theatre on the Lerchenfeld, into the capital of the Austrian empire. Of the performance itself the most wonderful accounts reached me. Sulzer, who on one of his journeys had passed through Vienna and had witnessed a performance, had complained principally of the darkness of the house, which did not allow him to read a single word of the libretto, also of its having rained hard right into the middle of the audience. Another story was told me some years later by the son-in-law of Mme. Herold, the widow of the composer of that name. He had been in Vienna at that period on his wedding tour, and had heard this Lerchenfeld performance. The young man assured me that, in spite of all superficial deficiencies, the production there had given him genuine pleasure, and had been more deeply impressive than the performance in the Berlin Court Theatre, which he had seen afterwards, and found immeasurably inferior. The energy of my old Riga Theatre director in Vienna brought me in two thousand francs for twenty performances of Tannhauser. After such a curious experience, offering clear proof of my popularity, I may perhaps be excused for having felt confident about the future, and having relied on incalculable results from my works, even with regard to actual gain.

While I was thus occupied in arranging the little country house for which I had longed so much, and working on the orchestration of the first act of Siegfried, I plunged anew into the philosophy of Schopenhauer and into Scott's novels, to which I was drawn with a particular affection. I also busied myself with elucidating my impressions of Liszt's compositions. For this purpose I adopted the form of a letter to Marie Wittgenstein, which was published in Brendel's musical journal.

When we moved to what I intended to be my permanent refuge for life, I again set myself to consider the means of obtaining a basis for the supply of the necessities of that life. Once again I took up the threads of my negotiations with Hartel about the Nibelungen, but I was obliged to put them down as unfruitful, and little calculated to end in any success for this work. I complained of this to Liszt, and openly told him how glad I should be if he would bring this to the ears of the Grand Duke of Weimar (who, from what my friend told me, wished himself still to be regarded as the patron of my Nibelungen enterprise), so that he might realise the difficulties I was encountering in the matter. I added that if one could not expect a common bookseller to assume the responsibility of such an extraordinary undertaking, one might well hope that the Prince, whose idea was to make it a point of honour, should take a share, and a serious share, in the necessary preliminaries, among which the development of the work itself must very properly be included. My meaning was, that the Grand Duke should take the place of Hartel, should purchase the work from me, and pay by instalments as the score neared completion; he would thus become the owner, and, later on, could if he liked cover his expenses through a publisher. Liszt understood me very well, but could not refrain from dissuading me from taking up such an attitude towards his Royal Highness.

My whole attention was now directed to the young Grand Duchess of Baden. Several years had passed since Eduard Devrient had been transferred to Karlsruhe by the Grand Duke to be manager of the court theatre there. Since my departure from Dresden I had always kept in touch with Devrient, though our meetings were rare. Moreover, he had written the most enthusiastic letters in appreciation of my pamphlets, Das Kunstwerk der Zukunft and Oper und Drama. He maintained that the Karlsruhe Theatre was so poorly equipped, that he thought he could not well entertain the idea of a performance of my operas in that house. All these conditions were suddenly changed when the Grand Duke married, and the Crown Princess's young daughter, who had been turned into a champion of mine by my old friend Alwine Frommann, thus secured a position of independence in Karlsruhe, and was eager in her demand for the performance of my works. My operas were now being produced there also, and Devrient in his turn had the pleasure of informing me of the great interest shown in them by the young Princess, who even frequently attended the rehearsals. This made a very agreeable impression upon me. On my own initiative I expressed my gratitude in an address which I directed to the Grand Duchess herself, enclosing 'Wotan's Abschied' from the finale of the Walkure as a souvenir for her album.

The 20th April was now drawing near, the day on which I was to leave my lodging in the Zeltweg (which had already been let), although I could not occupy the cottage, where the arrangements were not yet complete. The bad weather had given us colds in the course of our frequent visits to the little house, in which masons and carpenters had made themselves at home. In the worst of tempers we spent a week in the inn, and I began to wonder whether it was worth while occupying this new piece of land at all, for I had a sudden foreboding that it would be my fate to wander further afield. Eventually we moved in at the end of April, in spite of everything. It was cold and damp, the new heating apparatus did not provide any warmth, and we were both ill, and could hardly leave our beds. Then came a good omen: the first letter that reached me was one of reconciliation and love from Frau Julie Ritter, in which she told me that the quarrel, brought about by her son's conduct, was at last ended. Beautiful spring weather now set in; on Good Friday I awoke to find the sun shining brightly for the first time in this house: the little garden was radiant with green, the birds sang, and at last I could sit on the roof and enjoy the long-yearned-for peace with its message of promise. Full of this sentiment, I suddenly remembered that the day was Good Friday, and I called to mind the significance this omen had already once assumed for me when I was reading Wolfram's Parsifal. Since the sojourn in Marienbad, where I had conceived the Meistersinger and Lohengrin, I had never occupied myself again with that poem; now its noble possibilities struck me with overwhelming force, and out of my thoughts about Good Friday I rapidly conceived a whole drama, of which I made a rough sketch with a few dashes of the pen, dividing the whole into three acts.

In the midst of arranging the house, a never-ending task, at which I set to work with all my might, I felt an inner compulsion to work: I took up Siegfried again, and began to compose the second act. I had not made up my mind what name to give to my new place of refuge. As the introductory part of this act turned out very well, thanks to my favourable frame of mind, I burst out laughing at the thought that I ought to call my new home 'Fafner's Ruhe,' to correspond with the first piece of work done in it. It was not destined to be so, however. The property continued to be called simply 'Asyl,' and I have designated it under this title in the chart of dates to my works.

The miscarriage of my prospects of support for the Nibelungen from the Grand Duke of Weimar fostered in me a continued depression of spirits; for I saw before me a burden of which I knew not how to rid myself. At the same time a romantic message was conveyed to me: a man who rejoiced in the name of Ferreiro introduced himself to me as the Brazilian consul in Leipzig, and told me that the Emperor of Brazil was greatly attracted by my music. The man was an adept in meeting my doubts about this strange phenomenon in the letters which he wrote; the Emperor loved everything German, and wanted me very much to come to him in Rio Janeiro, so that I might conduct my operas in person. As only Italian was sung in that country, it would be necessary to translate my libretto, which the Emperor regarded as a very easy matter, and actually an improvement to the libretto itself. Strange to say, these proposals exercised a very agreeable influence on me. I felt I could easily produce a passionate musical poem which would turn out quite excellent in Italian, and I turned my thoughts once more, with an ever-reviving preference, towards Tristan und Isolde. In order in some way to test the intensity of that generous affection for my works protested by the Emperor of Brazil, I promptly sent to Senor Ferreiro the expensively bound volumes containing the pianoforte versions of my three earlier operas, and for a long time I indulged in the hope of some very handsome return from their gracious and splendid reception in Rio Janeiro. But of these pianoforte versions, and the Emperor of Brazil and his consul Ferreiro, I never heard a single syllable again as long as I lived. Semper, it is true, involved himself in an architectonic entanglement with this tropical country: a competition was invited for the building of a new opera house in Rio; Semper had announced that he would take part in it, and completed some splendid plans which afforded us great entertainment, and appeared to be of special interest, among others, to Dr. Wille, who thought that it must be a new problem for an architect to sketch an opera house for a black public. I have not learned whether the results of Semper's negotiations with Brazil were much more satisfactory than mine; at all events, I know that he did not build the theatre.

A violent cold threw me for a few days into a state of high fever; when I recovered from it, my birthday had come. As I was sitting once more in the evening on my roof, I was surprised at hearing one of the songs of the Three Rhine Maidens, from the finale of Rheingold, which floated to my ears from the near distance across the gardens. Frau Pollert, whose troubles with her husband had once stood in the way of a second performance in Magdeburg of my Liebesverbot (in itself a very difficult production), had again appeared last winter as a singer, and also as the mother of two daughters, in the theatrical firmament of Zurich. As she still had a fine voice, and was full of goodwill towards me, I allowed her to practise the last act of Walkure for herself, and the Rhine Maidens scenes from the Rheingold with her two daughters, and frequently in the course of the winter we had managed to give short performances of this music for our friends. On the evening of my birthday the song of my devoted lady friends surprised me in a very touching way, and I suddenly experienced a strange revulsion of feeling, which made me disinclined to continue the composition of the Nibelungen, and all the more anxious to take up Tristan again. I determined to yield to this desire, which I had long nourished in secret, and to set to work at once on this new task, which I had wished to regard only as a short interruption to the great one. However, in order to prove to myself that I was not being scared away from the older work by any feeling of aversion, I determined, at all events, to complete the composition of the second act of Siegfried, which had only just been begun. This I did with a right good will, and gradually the music of Tristan dawned more and more clearly on my mind.

To some extent external motives, which seemed to me both attractive and advantageous to the execution of my task, acted as incentives to make me set to work on Tristan. These motives became fully defined when Eduard Devrient came on a visit to me at the beginning of July and stayed with me for three days. He told me of the good reception accorded to my despatch by the Grand Duchess of Baden, and I gathered that he had been commissioned to come to an understanding with me about some enterprise or other; I informed him that I had decided to interrupt my work on the Nibelungen by composing an opera, which was bound by its contents and requirements to put me once more into relation with the theatres, however inferior they might be. I should do myself an injustice if I said that this external motive alone inspired the conception of Tristan, and made me determine to have it produced. Nevertheless, I must confess that a perceptible change had come over the frame of mind in which, several years ago, I had contemplated the completion of the greater work. At the same time I had come fresh from my writings upon art, in which I had attempted to explain the reasons for the decay of our public art, and especially of the theatre, by seeking to establish some connection between these reasons and the prevailing condition of culture. It would have been impossible for me at that time to have devoted myself to a work which compelled me to study its immediate production at one of our existing theatres. It was only an utter disregard of these theatres, as I have taken occasion to observe before, that could determine me to take up my artistic work again. With regard to the Nibelungen dramas, I was compelled to adhere without flinching to the one essential stipulation that it could only be produced under quite exceptional conditions, such as those I afterwards described in the preface to the printed edition of the poem. Nevertheless, the successful popularisation of my earlier operas had so far influenced my frame of mind that, as I approached the completion of more than half of my great work, I felt I could look forward with growing confidence to the possibility that this too might be produced. Up to this point Liszt had been the only person to nourish the secret hope of my heart, as he was confident that the Grand Duke of Weimar would do something for me, but to judge from my latest experience these prospects amounted to nothing, while I had grounds for hoping that a new work of similar design to Tannhauser or Lohengrin would be taken up everywhere with considerable alacrity. The manner in which I finally executed the plan of Tristan shows clearly how little I was thinking of our operatic theatres and the scope of their capabilities. Nevertheless, I had still to fight a continuous battle for the necessaries of life, and I succeeded in deceiving myself so far as to persuade myself that in interrupting the composition of the Nibelungen and taking up Tristan, I was acting in the practical spirit of a man who carefully weighs the issues at stake. Devrient was much pleased to hear that I was undertaking a work that could be regarded as practical. He asked me at which theatre I contemplated producing my new work. I answered that naturally I could only have in view a theatre in which it would be possible for me to superintend the task of production in person. My idea was that this would either be in Brazil or, as I was excluded from the territory of the German Confederation, in one of the towns lying near the German frontiers, which I presumed would be able to place an operatic company at my disposal. The place I had in my mind was Strasburg, but Devrient had many practical reasons for being wholly opposed to such an undertaking; he was of opinion that a performance in Karlsruhe could be arranged more easily and would meet with greater success. My only objection to this was, that in that town I should be debarred from taking a personal share in the study and production of my work. Devrient, however, thought that, as far as this was concerned, I might feel justified in entertaining some hope, as the Grand Duke of Baden was so well disposed towards me, and took an active interest in my work. I was highly delighted to learn this. Devrient also spoke with great sympathy of the young tenor Schnorr, who, besides possessing admirable gifts, was keenly attracted by my operas. I was now in the best of tempers, and acted the host to Devrient for all I was worth. One morning I played and sang to him the whole of the Rheingold, which seemed to give him great pleasure. Half seriously, and half in joke, I told him that I had written the character of Mime especially for him, and that if, when the work was ready, it was not too late, he might have the pleasure of taking the part. As Devrient was with me, he had, of course, to do his share of reciting. I invited all the friends in our circle, including Semper and Herwegh, and Devrient read us the Mark Antony scenes from Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. So happy was his interpretation of the part, that even Herwegh, who had approached the recitation from its outset in a spirit of ridicule, freely acknowledged the success of the practised actor's skilful manipulation. Devrient wrote a letter from my house to the Grand Duke of Baden, telling him his impressions about me and what he had found me like. Soon after his departure I received an autograph letter from the Grand Duke, couched in very amiable terms, in which he first thanked me most profusely for the souvenir I had presented to his wife for her album, and at the same time declared his intention of championing my cause, and, above all, of securing my return to Germany.