could do was done to make the design of the piece understood. Liszt saw what was wanted at once, and did it. Success was his reward; and with this success he now approaches me, saying ‘See, we have come thus far; now create us a new work, that we may go further.’”
Lohengrin was, in fact, produced at Weimar under Liszt's direction on the 28th of August 1850. It was a severe trial to Wagner not to hear his own work, but he knew that it was in good hands, and he responded to Liszt's appeal for a new creation by studying the Nibelungenlied and gradually shaping it into a gigantic tetralogy. At this time also he first began to lay out the plan of Tristan und Isolde, and to think over the possibilities of Parsifal.
During his exile Wagner matured his plans and perfected his musical style; but it was not until some considerable time after his return that any of the works he then meditated were placed upon the stage. In 1855 he accepted an invitation to London, where he conducted the concerts of the Philharmonic Society with great success. In 1857 he completed the libretto of Tristan und Isolde at Venice, adopting the Celtic legend modified by Gottfried of Strasburg's medieval version. But the music was delayed until the strange incident of a message from the emperor of Brazil encouraged Wagner to complete it in 1859. In that year Wagner visited Paris for the third time; and after much negotiation, in which he was nobly supported by the Prince and Princess Metternich, Tannhäuser was accepted at the Grand Opera. Magnificent preparations were made; it was rehearsed 164 times, 14 times with the full orchestra; and the scenery and dresses were placed entirely under the composer's direction. More than £8000 was expended upon the venture; and the work was performed for the first time in the French language and with the new Venusberg music on the 13th of March 1861. But, for political reasons, a powerful clique was determined to suppress Wagner. A scandalous riot was inaugurated by the members of the Parisian Jockey Club, who interrupted the performance with howls and dog-whistles; and after the third representation the opera was withdrawn. Wagner was broken-hearted. But the Princess Metternich continued to befriend him, and by 1861 she had obtained a pardon for his political offences, with permission to settle in any part of Germany except Saxony. Even this restriction was removed in 1862.
Wagner now settled for a time in Vienna, where Tristan und Isolde was accepted, but abandoned after fifty-seven rehearsals, through the incompetence of the tenor. Lohengrin was, however, produced on the 15th of May 1861, when Wagner heard it for the first time. His circumstances were now extremely straitened ; it was the darkness before dawn. In 1863 he published the libretto of Der Ring des Nibelungen. King Ludwig of Bavaria was much struck with it, and in 1864 invited Wagner, who was then at Stuttgart, to come to Munich and finish his work there. Wagner accepted with rapture. The king gave him an annual grant of 1200 gulden (£120), considerably enlarging it before the end of the year, and placing a comfortable house in the outskirts of the city at his disposal. The master expressed his gratitude in a “Huldigungsmarsch.” In the autumn he was formally commissioned to proceed with the tetralogy and to furnish proposals for the building of a theatre and the foundation of a Bavarian music school. All promised well, but no sooner did his position seem assured than a miserable court intrigue was formed against him. His political indiscretions at Dresden were made the excuse for bitter persecutions: scandalmongers made his friendship with the ill-fated king a danger to both; and Wagner was obliged to retire to Triebschen near Lucerne for the next six years.
On the 10th of June 1865 at Munich, Tristan und Isolde was produced for the first time, with Herr and Frau Schnorr in the principal parts. Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg, first sketched in 1845, was completed in 1867 and first performed at Munich under the direction of Hans von Bülow on the 21st of June 1868. The story, though an original one, is founded on the character of Hans Sachs, the poet-shoemaker of Nuremberg. The success of the opera was very great; but the production of the Nibelung tetralogy as a whole still remained impracticable, though Das Rheingold and Die Walküre were performed, the one on the 22nd of September 1869 and the other on the 26th of June 1870. The scheme for building a new theatre at Munich having been abandoned, there was no opera-house in Germany fit for so colossal a work. A project was therefore started for the erection of a suitable building at Bayreuth (q.v.). Wagner laid the first stone of this in 1872, and the edifice was completed, after almost insuperable difficulties, in 1876.
After this Wagner resided permanently at Bayreuth, in a house named Wahnfried, in the garden of which he built his tomb. His first wife, from whom he had parted since 1861, died in 1865; and in 1870 he was united to Liszt's daughter Cosima, who had previously been the wife of von Bülow. Meantime Der Ring des Nibelungen was rapidly approaching completion, and on the 13th of August 1876 the introductory portion, Das Rheingold, was performed at Bayreuth for the first time as part of the great whole, followed on the 14th by Die Walküre, on the 16th by Siegfried and on the 17th by Götterdämmerung. The performance, directed by Hans Richter, excited extraordinary attention; but the expenses were enormous, and burdened the management with a debt of £7500. A small portion of this was raised (at great risk) by performances at the Albert Hall in London, conducted by Wagner and Richter, in 1877. The remainder was met by the profits upon performances of the tetralogy at Munich.
Wagner's next and last work was Parsifal, based upon the legend of the Holy Grail, as set forth, not in the legend of the Morte d'Arthur, but in the versions of Chrestien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach and other less-known works. The libretto was complete before his visit to London in 1877. The music was begun in the following year, and completed at Palermo on the 13th of January 1882. The first sixteen performances took place at Bayreuth, in July and August 1882, under Wagner's own directing, and fully realized all expectations.
Unhappily the exertion of directing so many consecutive performances seems to have been too much for the veteran master's strength, for towards the close of 1882 his health began to decline rapidly. He spent the autumn at Venice, and was well enough on Christmas Eve to conduct his early symphony (composed in 1833) at a private performance given at the Liceo Marcello. But late in the afternoon of the 13th of February 1883 his friends were shocked by his sudden death from heart failure.
Wagner was buried at Wahnfried in the tomb he had himself prepared, on the 18th of February; and a few days afterwards King Ludwig rode to Bayreuth alone, and at dead of night, to pay his last tribute to the master of his world of dreams.
In the articles on Music and Opera, Wagner's task in music-drama is described, and it remains here to discuss his progress in the operas themselves. This progress has perhaps no parallel in any art, and certainly none in music, for even Beethoven's progress was purely an increase in range and power. Beethoven, we know, lost sympathy with his early works as he grew older; but that was because his later works absorbed his interest, not because his early works misrepresented his ideals. Wagner's earlier works have too long been treated as if they represented the pure and healthy childhood of his later ideal; as if Lohengrin stood to Parsifal as Haydn, Mozart and early Beethoven stand to Beethoven's last quartets. But Wagner never thus represented the childhood of an ideal, though he attained the manhood of the most comprehensive ideal yet known in art. To change the metaphor the ideal was always in sight, and Wagner never swerved from his path towards it; but that path began in a blaze of garish false lights, and it had become very tortuous before the light of day prevailed. Beethoven was trained in the greatest and most advanced musical tradition of his lime. For all his Wagnerian impatience, his progress was no struggle from out of a squalid environment; on the contrary, one of his latest discoveries was the greatness of his master Haydn. Now Wagner's excellent teacher Weinlig did certainly, as Wagner himself testifies, teach him more of good music than Beethoven,
