CHAPTER IV.
1850-1861.
EXILE.
Visit to Liszt—Flight to Foreign Lands—Three Pamphlets—“Lohengrin” Performed—Wagner’s Musical Ideas Expressed in Words—Resumption of the Nibelungen Poem—The Idea of the Poem—Its Religious Element—The First Music-Drama—In Zurich—New Art Ideas—Increasing Fame—“Tristan and Isolde”—Analysis of this Work—In Paris Again—The Amnesty—Tannhaeuser at the “Grand Opera”—“Lohengrin” in Vienna—Resurrection of the “Mastersingers of Nuremberg”—Final Return to Germany.
Seeking with all the soul the Grecian land.—Goethe.
The first impression following his sudden change of fate appeared in Wagner’s own world as a good omen. “What I felt as I conceived this music, he felt when he conducted it; what I intended to say as I wrote it, he said as he interpreted it,” he says of the Tannhaeuser rehearsal under Liszt’s direction in Weimar, where he had gone for a few days for the sake of this “rarest of friends,” who had already of his own accord given “Rienzi” and “Tannhaeuser” in the small Thuringian court-residence to which the Wartburg belongs.
His stay was cut short however, and disguised as a waggoner he left the city. Unfortunately the only place which he could reach in safety was Paris, and from this city he also speedily fled as from a dismal spectre whose disgusting features were again recognized. And yet he was destined to return to it, to retrieve his fortunes, with a possible success as an opera-composer, but also to be permanently convinced that this “modern Babylon,” where others had conquered the world with their art-substitutes, was in absolute contrast with that which he sought and needed for his labors. But of Weimar he exclaimed:
“How wonderful! By the love of this rarest of friends, in the time when I was homeless, I secured the long desired and true home for my art, which I had hitherto sought in vain elsewhere. When I was doomed to wander in foreign lands, he who had wandered so much, retired permanently to a small town and there provided me a home.”
Liszt had given up entirely his career as a performer, and acted mainly as Hofkapellmeister at the grand-ducal court in Weimar. Wagner made his acquaintance “in the terrible Parisian past,” but did not then understand him. Liszt, however, lovingly watched his progress like an elder brother, and drew the misunderstood genius to his great heart. “Everywhere and always he cared for me. Ever prompt and decisive where aid was required, with a cordial response to all my wishes, and devoted love for me, he was to me what I had never found before, and with that intensity whose fullness we only comprehend when it actually embraces us in all its vastness.”
Among the inspiring mountains of Switzerland he wrote a protest against the pretense of the momentary victors of the revolution, that they were the protectors of art. His pamphlet, “Art and the Revolution,” disclosed the real nature of this so called art in the unsettled political and social condition of the time, and energetically rejected as art anything which under any guise sought to speculate upon the public. The “Art-Work of the Future” was a more extended paper which described the deadly influence of modern fashion upon art itself and the egoistic dismemberment of it into distinct branches, and revealed the art of the future as embracing all human art-capacities.