Life of Richard Wagner. Louis Nohl
humiliation for he was conscious of the prize to be obtained by “serving.” A partial compensation in thus working for hire he found in the permission given him by the sympathetic music publisher, Schlesinger, to write for his Gazette Musicale to which he contributed many brilliant articles. In these he could at least do in words what he was not allowed to do otherwise. He could disclose the splendor of German music, and never before has anyone written of Mozart, Weber, and Beethoven with keener appreciation or profounder thought. Of the last named he proposed to write a comprehensive biography and entered into correspondence with a publisher in Germany.1 He confronted the formal culture of the Latin races with the character of the German mind, as it were the head of the Medusa, and the consciousness of his mission kept up his spirits under the most trying circumstances. With Paris as an art centre he had done. Like Mozart’s “Idomeneo” to the Opera Seria, “Rienzi” was his last tribute to the Grand Opera. They have forever extinguished the genre in style by exhausting its capabilities.
In the meantime “Rienzi” had been accepted at Dresden, and he now hoped through Meyerbeer’s influence to see it also accepted by the Grand Opera. The director, however, had been so well pleased with the “Flying Dutchman” that he wished to appropriate the poem for himself, or rather for another composer. In order therefore not to lose everything, Wagner sold the copyright for Paris for 500 francs and it soon after appeared as “Vaisseau Phantome.” It naturally followed that for the present his most urgent task was to complete the work for himself and in his own way. The performance of the “Freischuetz” had increased his ambition and his other experiences had completely disgusted him with the modern Babylon. The romance—for such it was—was soon finished. He had allowed a beautiful myth simply to tell its own story and had avoided all the nonsense of the opera with its finales, duets, and ballets, wishing simply to reveal to his countrymen once more the divine attributes of the soul. But now that the romance was to be set to music he feared that his art might have deserted him, so long had it remained unused. However the work progressed rapidly enough. He had in his mind as the main motive of the work, Senta’s ballad, and around it clustered at once the whole musical arrangement of the material. The Sailor’s Chorus and the Spinning Song were popular melodies, for the “Freischuetz” continually kept them humming in his ears. In seven weeks the work was completed, with the exception of the overture, which every day’s pressing wants retarded for a few weeks longer.
Leipzig and Munich promptly declined the work with which he had proposed to salute his fatherland once more. The latter city declared that the opera was not adapted to Germany! Through Meyerbeer’s influence it was then accepted in Berlin. Thus hated Paris led to the production of two works in which he touched strings that find their fullest response only in a German’s heart. The prospect of returning to his fatherland delighted him. What could be more natural than that his mind strove to study more and more closely the spirit and development of his fatherland, in order to raise other and better monuments to it? He renewed his studies in German history, although solely for the purpose of finding suitable material for operas. At first, Manfred and the brilliant era of the Hohenstauffens attracted him. But this historic world at once and utterly disappeared when he beheld that figure in which the spirit of the Ghibellines attained in human form its highest development and greatest beauty—Tannhaeuser! His previous readings in German literature had made him familiar with the story, but he now for the first time understood it. The simple popular tale stirred him to such a degree that his whole soul was filled with the image of its hero. It revealed the path to the historic depths of our folk-lore to which Beethoven’s and Weber’s music had long since given him the clues. The story had some connection with the “Saengerkrieg auf Wartburg,” and in this contest, he saw at once the possibility of fully revealing the qualities of his hero, who raises the first German protest against the pretended culture and sham morality of the Latin world. The old poem of this “Saengerkrieg,” is further connected with the legend of Lohengrin. Thus it was that in foreign Paris he was destined to gain at once and permanently a realization of the native qualities of our common nature, which, from primeval times, the German spirit has put into these legends.
After a stay of more than three years abroad, he left Paris, April 7, 1842. “For the first time I saw the Rhine; with tears in my eyes, I, a poor artist, swore to be ever loyal to my German fatherland,” he says. Have we not seen that this “poor artist” with the might of his magic wand has created a world of new life, and what is far more, has aroused the genius of his people, aye, the very soul of mankind, and has led his epoch and his nation to the achievement of new and permanent intellectual results?
We now come to his first efforts towards the accomplishment of such results. They were to cost hard labor, anxiety, struggles, and pain of every kind indeed, but they were done and they stand to-day.
The letter appears in the book entitled “Mosaics,” published in Leipzig, 1881.
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