Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, vol 1 | Page 5

at recollecting the
repeated and eager attempts he made to change my opinion of him,
even before he knew any of my works. He acted not from any artistic
sympathy, but was led by the purely human wish of discontinuing a

casual disharmony between himself and another being; perhaps he also
felt an infinitely tender misgiving of having really hurt me
unconsciously. He who knows the terrible selfishness and insensibility
in our social life, and especially in the relations of modern artists to
each other, cannot but be struck with wonder, nay, delight, by the
treatment I experienced from this extraordinary man.
"This happened at a time when it became more and more evident that
my dramatic works would have no outward success. But just when the
case seemed desperate Liszt succeeded by his own energy in opening a
hopeful refuge to my art. He ceased his wanderings, settled down at the
small, modest Weimar, and took up the conductor's baton, after having
been at home so long in the splendour of the greatest cities of Europe.
At Weimar I saw him for the last time, when I rested a few days in
Thuringia, not yet certain whether the threatening prosecution would
compel me to continue my flight from Germany. The very day when
my personal danger became a certainty, I saw Liszt conduct a rehearsal
of my "Tannhauser", and was astonished at recognizing my second-self
in his achievement. What I had felt in inventing this music he felt in
performing it; what I wanted to express in writing it down he
proclaimed in making it sound. Strange to say, through the love of this
rarest friend, I gained, at the moment of becoming homeless, the real
home for my art, which I had longed for and sought for always in the
wrong place.
"At the end of my last stay in Paris, when ill, miserable, and despairing,
I sat brooding over my fate, my eye fell on the score of my "Lohengrin",
totally forgotten by me. Suddenly I felt something like compassion that
this music should never sound from off the death-pale paper. Two
words I wrote to Liszt; his answer was the news that preparations for
the performance were being made on the largest scale the limited
means of Weimar would permit. Everything that men and
circumstances could do was done in order to make the work understood.
Success was his reward, and with this success he now approaches me,
saying, 'Behold we have come so far; now create us a new work that we
may go still further.'"

Wagner's words, as above quoted, may have seemed an exaggerated
tribute of gratitude to many. After reading these letters one comes to
the conclusion that they are the expression of a plain fact. It is a
well-known French saying that in every love affair there is one person
who adores while the other allows himself to be adored, and that saying
may, with equal justice, be applied to the many literary and artistic
friendships of which, pace the elder D'Israeli, history knows so many
examples. Petrarch and Boccaccio, Schiller and Goethe, Byron and
Shelley immediately occur to the mind in such a connection; but in
none of these is the mutual position of giver and receiver of worshipper
and worshipped so distinctly marked as in the case under discussion.
Nature itself, or, at least, external circumstances, had indeed almost
settled the matter. In the earlier stages of this friendship the worldly
position of the two men was a widely different one. Liszt was at the
time perhaps the most famous musician alive, and although he had
voluntarily abandoned an active career, he remained the friend of kings
and ecclesiastic potentates, and the head and centre of an admiring
school of disciples.
Wagner at the same period was, in familiar language--nobody. He had
lost his position at the Royal Opera at Dresden through his participation
in the revolutionary rising of 1849, and he was an exile from his
country. As an artist his antecedents were not very glorious. He had
written three operas, all of which had met with fair success, but none of
which had taken real hold of the public, and the Court theatres of
Germany were naturally not very prone to favour the interests of an
outlawed rebel. In spite of this disparity of fortune, it is curious to see
how the two men, almost from the first, assume the mutual position
already indicated. Liszt, from the beginning, realizes, with a self-
abnegation and a freedom from vanity almost unique in history, that he
is dealing with a man infinitely greater than himself, and to serve the
artistic and personal purposes of that man he regards as a sacred duty.
Wagner's attitude in the matter will be judged differently