WAGNER IN THE TRISTAN PERIOD.
He lived, indeed, to see himself victor everywhere, in possession of everything for which he had struggled his whole feverish life through. He completed, and saw upon the stage, every one of the great works he had planned. He found the one woman in the world who was fitted to share his throne with him when alive and to govern his kingdom after his death with something of his own overbearing, inconsiderate strength. He achieved the miracle of building in a tiny Bavarian town a theatre to which, for more than a generation after his death, musicians still flock from all the ends of the earth. After all its dangers and its buffetings, the great ship at last sailed into haven with every timber sound, and with what a store of incomparable merchandise within!
FOOTNOTES:
[44] See Mein Leben, pp. 19, 20. Later on he speaks of "the importance the theatrical had assumed in his mind in comparison with the ordinary bourgeois life" (Mein Leben, p. 25).
[45] Mein Leben, p. 65.
[46] "He had it temperament like a watch-spring, easily compressed, but always flying back with redoubled energy," says Pecht, who knew him during the time of his appalling misery in Paris. Glasenapp, Das Leben Richard Wagners, i. 329.
[47] Briefe an Apel, p. 15.
[48] Briefe an Apel, p. 48.
[49] He is writing from Frankfort.
[50] Letter of January 21, 1836.