Correspondence of Wagner and Liszt, vol 1 | Page 6

by different
people, according to the opinion they have of the permanent and
supreme value of his work. He simply accepts the position as he finds it.

"Here am I," he may have said to himself, "with a brain teeming with
art work of a high and lasting kind; my resources are nil, and if the
world, or at least the friends who believe in me, wish me to do my
allotted task, they must free me from the sordid anxieties of existence."
The words, here placed in quotation marks, do not actually occur in any
of the letters, but they may be read between the lines of many of them.
The naivete with which Wagner expresses himself on this subject is
indeed almost touching, and it must be owned that his demands for help
are, according to English notions at least, extremely modest. A pension
of 300 thalers, or about,œ45 of our money, which he expects from the
Grand Duke of Weimar for the performing right of his operas, is
mentioned on one occasion as the summit of his desire. Unfortunately,
even this small sum was not forthcoming, and Wagner accordingly for
a long time depended upon the kindness of his friends and the stray
sums which the royalties on his operas brought him as his sole support.
He for himself, as he more than once declares, would not have feared
poverty, and with the touch of the dramatic element in his nature,
which was peculiar to him, would perhaps have found a certain
pleasure in going through the world, an artistic Belisarius asking the
lovers of his art for their obolus. But he had a wife (his first wife), weak
in health, and anxious of mind, and to protect her from every care is his
chief desire--a desire which has something beautiful and pathetic in it,
and is the redeeming feature of the many appeals for a loan, and
sometimes for a present, which occur in these letters.
Liszt was only too willing to give, but his means were extremely
limited. He had realized large sums during his artistic career; but he
was liberal almost to a fault, and poor artists, inundated Hungarian
peasants, and the Beethoven monument at Bonn profited a great deal
more by his successes than he did himself. What little remained of his
savings had been settled upon his aged mother and his three children,
and at the time here alluded to his only fixed income was the salary of
less than [pounds] 200, which he derived from the Weimar Theatre.
This explanation he himself gives to Wagner, in answer to the
following remarkable sentence in one of that master's letters:--"I once
more return to the question, can you let me have the 1,000 francs as a
gift, and would it be possible for you to guarantee me the same annual

sum for the next two years?" The 1,000 francs was forthcoming soon
afterwards, but poor Liszt had to decline the additional obligation for
two other years.
The above passage is quoted as an instance of many others, and one
must admire the candour of Wagner's widow, who has not suppressed a
single touch in the picture of this beautiful friendship. But Liszt's help
was not limited to material things. What was infinitely more valuable to
Wagner, and what excited his gratitude to even more superlative
utterance, was the confidence which Liszt showed in his genius, and
without which, it is no exaggeration to say, Wagner's greatest works
would probably have remained unwritten.
The first performance of "Lohengrin" at Weimar, which was really the
starting-point of his fame, has already been alluded to. Every further
step in his career was watched and encouraged by the loving sympathy
of Liszt, and when Wagner, overpowered by the grandeur and
difficulties of his "Nibelungen" scheme, was on the point of laying
down the pen, it was Liszt who urged him to continue in his arduous
task, and to go on in spite of all discouragement.
It must not, however, be thought that Wagner alone derived benefits
from this remarkable friendship. Not only did he in his turn encourage
Liszt in the career of a composer of great and novel works, but he
distinctly raised the intellectual and artistic level of his friend. Liszt's
nature was of a noble, one may say, ideal kind, but he had lived in
dangerous surroundings, and the influence of the great world and of the
glaring publicity in which a virtuoso moves, had left its trace on his
individuality. Here, then, the uncompromising idealism, the
world-defying artistic conviction of Wagner, served as a tonic to his
character. If the reader will refer to Letter 21, or at least to that portion
of it which has been vouchsafed by Madame Wagner, he will see how