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The request which comes to me from America, that I will
personally address the readers of a well-known New York review on
the subject of my artistic opinions and methods, is one which
cannot fail to move me greatly. Here, in my own country, I have
long thought it best to refrain from all publication of my ideas,
experiences, and plans to any general audience. Whatever a life of
sixty years has shown me or taught me of the world—and
especially of the art that has been produced or reproduced in
it—I have recorded in occasional writings extending over
half that period; and later, at an important epoch of my life, I
brought these together in an edition of nine volumes of
"collected works." This book I offered to the German
people as the complete result of my experience as an artist, and as
a German. Though my countrymen had begun to feel a growing and
active interest in my art, they had been kept in the dark—and
indeed involved in the most puzzling misconceptions—as to my
special artistic aims, and the ideals after which I was striving
above and beyond my own personal labors and achievements. This
ignorance had been brought about by the continual influence of
elements fundamentally hostile
In time, however, and in the very midst of the strife that went on over what were called my art principles, a little circle of friends grew up, who made a diligent study of my writings, and were led by the impression made by my artistic works more nearly to an understanding of my broader ideas—those which looked beyond what I could personally accomplish. And, finally, when I undertook, instead of ineffectual written explanations, actually to give a living example of what I had been striving for—undertook, amid extraordinary difficulties, the production of a German musical and dramatic art-work, in the magnificent manner befitting it, and in a place especially constructed for it at Bayreuth—these friends rallied about me with efficient aid. The occasion of the first great festival—the performance of my "Ring of the Nibelungen" in the year 1876—united them into an independent league or society, which especially set itself apart from the body of the nation, to further the continuance and development of my undertaking.
If I should wish in any way or at any time to give expression to
my wishes in regard to our art, or to explain the reasons which had
led me to hold these wishes, and which continually confirmed me in
them, it was natural that such expression should be addressed only
to the members of this society—the Bayreuther
Patronatsverein. The journal published by the society for the
special purpose of these—to a certain extent
private—communications, and restricted exclusively to the use
of its members—the "Bayreuther
Blätter,"—seemed, of course, the only proper
organ for me to use in all such eases. It required, therefore, an
appeal from another world—from beyond the ocean, from the
so-called "new" world of America—to induce me to
allow my name once more to appear elsewhere, in a public
periodical, and attached to a new explanation of my aims in art.
The "old" world, and especially that part of it
included in our new Germany, will hear no more from me directly on
this subject.
In my artistic efforts I did not have in mind myself and my own
works alone, but a vital need of our whole noblest national art;
nor was it simply the wretched condition of this latter which fixed
my attention. That condition had early led me to look most
seriously into the influences that controlled our whole
civilization, and, from a critical examination of this
civilization, to begin a most thorough discussion of the
possibility of essentially changing the existing order of things.
Only such a change seemed to me to promise a free field for the
complete success and prosperity of art. I could not conceive of a
national art entirely separated from the basis of our national
culture; and this culture, the sum total of all the elements in
Germany's political and social state, appeared to me, from an
early point in my study of it, to be something unnatural, narrow,
weak, incapable of producing the true realization of any great
national idea—in a word, to be something altogether
un-German.
Now and then my eyes turned from the saddening recognition of
these surroundings in my own country, and were directed by some
encouraging signs toward the land beyond the ocean. There it seemed
as though the Germanic spirit, in untrammeled development, were
about to open to us a new realm for the exercise of its
unconquerable vigor and strength. The great overplus of this
strength, as we see it there let loose for the vast untouched work
of a civilization that has as yet no history behind it, may well
make us often shrink back alarmed, and lead us to think that
culture in our sense—culture which can only reach its ideal
height in a great development of art—must be irreconcilable
with such forces. Yet in spite of this such a glance toward the New
World always awakened hope in me, as hope is always aroused when
one looks at anything really strong. It may be that a long time
must still pass in toil and care for the needs of the moment,
before the great period of a fully rounded civilization will be
reached; but how much is already gained in the single fact that the
German mind can there develop in activity and freedom, unoppressed
by the wretched burdens left upon it by a melancholy history! When,
with the gradual establishment of the needful quiet in social and
political relations, all the evils connected with the work of
civilizing, but not inherited from the past, shall one by one drop
away—then, it may be hoped, a new civilization will grow up
upon the field so energetically and securely won. Such a
civilization will then be able to turn with like strength and
freedom, and with a greatness of spirit born of successfully gained
and general material prosperity,
ideal aims also; so that it is there, perhaps,
that the Germanic mind will once more attain to the full glory of
an art that is all its own.
What serves to strengthen this daring and far-reaching hope is
the recollection of a law of history that has often before been
verified. If we look back into the remote past of our people, we
shall see how precisely those Teutonic races which broke away from
the soil of their own land, and emigrated beyond its borders into
strange countries, were the ones to display most powerfully the
incomparable strength and greatness of the Teutonic family, in
unexampled conquests, brilliant and daring deeds, and all-important
results. Even where their quickly-won rule over a foreign country
has outwardly been overturned after a little time, or where their
peculiar character has lost its independent and distinctive traits
and expression by amalgamation with a foreign people—even
there their immigration has had a decisive influence on the future
development of the mind of that people and that country. At this
day the two great civilized nations of England and France, and, in
the three great Latin regions of Europe, the provinces of Normandy,
Lombardy, and Andalusia, bear names derived from the first German
emigrants—the Vandals, Lombards, Normans, Franks, and
Anglo-Saxons. The Anglo-Saxons especially, above and beyond all
others, succeeded in founding, upon the wonderful Celtic islands
which they conquered, a really Germanic civilization. Even now this
civilization shows itself as the true development of the English
people, though the Gallicized Norman nobility have ruled
for nearly a thousand years over the Saxon race of England.
Certainly it is a true Germanic race that has gone forth from its
English home, and, continually recruited by emigrants from the
mother-country of Germany, is working out the future of America. It
shows in this its old habit—it shows itself in its true
strength and greatness on a foreign soil, thrown upon its own
activity and energy, and compelled to build up a new
self-sustaining community. On the other hand, that part of the race
which has remained in Germany—that part which bore the
special, distinctive name of Germans, and even in the old days
staid quietly at home—has always represented the peculiar
type of the German "Philistine." He lets himself be
hampered and hemmed in on every side; and lives out his long tale
of little woes, in pettiness and wretchedness, amid continual
bickerings with neighbors like himself.
But there is one growth that has come again and again from this
individual
German—the Great Man, standing alone in strange,
majestic isolation, as only Germany has given him being—as
she has brought him forth especially, to the amazement of the
world, in the domain of Art—that art which otherwise
has gained in Germany so small a foothold. Think of the line of
mighty German poets and musicians! Though they lived all their
lives as strangers amid the hostility of their countrymen, it was
they, nevertheless, through whom the true German mind exercised an
influence beyond the boundaries of its own land. Even there, in the
outside world, it could act upon that old strain of German blood
that runs through all the nations. The ideal strength of the
Germanic spirit shows continually that it is a strength not
national but inter-national; and it preserves for the
great mother-stem of the race the esteem and honor of the countries
of the world.
But those peaceful German world-conquerors who have migrated from Europe to the land beyond the sea, to found there a new civilization and to labor for its development—they at least can find their noble prototypes in the great masters in their native country, who fought their way successfully, amid evils and obstacles of every kind, to that ideal freedom in which only the genius of the Germanic race can be fully revealed. In this sense, a Goethe and a Beethoven should seem to the reverential gaze of the young Teutonic peoples, far away in the New World, like the figures of their national gods and heroes—to remind them that they must never fail to let the immortal spirit of these men work with them, in the necessary ideal completion of the civilization they are building up.
Whoever has given any attention to my own career, and has
gathered from my occasional writings some idea of my character and
its development, will easily understand that I was precisely the
one, among my German countrymen, who must have felt most vehemently
the longing for such a new birth of German civilization
—somewhere and at some time. The longer I lived, the more I
saw the fading away of that vivid memory of our true German
culture, which, at the beginning of this century, it seemed that
the mighty strength of our great artists was about to awaken and
lead to great results. Wider and wider spread before my eyes the
heterogeneous web of a civilization entirely foreign to the German
race—a web that glittered with two changing colors, the
sallow hue of the Restoration, in the old French sense of an
oligarchy of
It was at this very time of the great struggle and victory, that
the greatest of the masters lived—those in whom the spirit of
this conquering force had shown itself anew. Goethe and Beethoven
were still alive; and in Weber's pure and noble strains the
young genius of Germany took possession of the stage in the
inspiring sounds of music. Thus this revival of the Germanic spirit
need not have lacked, at the moment of completing its work of
founding an independent political civilization, the noble aid of
being able to reveal itself in living energy in the domain of
art also. Indeed, this artistic development would for the
first time, upheld by political power, have taken on its most
perfect national form, which before, isolated as it was,
it had never been able to assume. It is only through the stage that
a national art can become truly the property of the people; and
only when the great part which belongs to the stage in popularizing
and embodying art is properly secured to it, can this art attain to
a full and free national life in other branches. A true, living,
national drama, elevated to the height of an artistic ideal, is the
real, pure, invigorating source of all other national art-life, and
the most complete expression of national culture. Thus the wretched
condition of the modern European stage, thoroughly unnational and
inartistic, and supplied from the sweepings of the lower class
French theatres, is one of the surest gauges of the spirit of
modern European civilization in general.
Goethe and Schiller had also striven to develop the spirit of
the people by means of the stage; but they were compelled to work
far in advance of the theatre's capabilities, as it existed
in their time; and it would have been the part of the stage to
follow after them—just as the German princes had had to
follow hurriedly after the political spirit that had run before
them, in order to secure to themselves the element of strength that
it furnished. But when at length German music succeeded in
inspiring the stage to a complete revival by breathing into it the
breath of a new life, this was the decisive moment when an
intelligent support of native art, by a
did not happen and could not happen, showed
on the other hand that the regenerated German spirit, in a restored
German state, had suffered a most disastrous defeat, from which it
has never been able to recover.
The victorious end of the great conflict had preserved for the
people its own rulers; and the youth of the country, purified by
its baptism of brave deeds, now showed itself ready and filled with
lofty enthusiasm, for a worthy work of peace—prepared to help
the princes to whom its efforts had secured their thrones, in
developing a true German life among their people. In the
associations of these young men, returning from the turmoil of war
to their studies at the universities, there lived the noble spirit
of their beloved Schiller, now first accomplishing its real
results—laboring everywhere to purify the morals of the
people—to ennoble alike their inner and outward life. Up to
this time the rough coarseness of the vagabond mercenaries of the
Thirty Years' war had prevailed and been transmitted among
the German students—their method, in the societies they
called their "Landsmannschaften," of protesting noisily
against the Frenchified civilization of the Philistines. But now
this barbaric spirit was banished from the more serious temper of a
youth inspired by the great works of their country's classic
writers, and hardened by the battles of the war of
liberation—men in the old-German blouses of the
Burschenschaft, under which beat pure and fiery German hearts. In
the place of the old coarseness and brutality, were set a healthy
vigor and the true enthusiasm of the new-born national life. The
rescued princes, amid their own diplomatic peace-making, saw all
this, and were alarmed at this new strength. They had thought of
nothing but the restoration of the Bourbon system and of the spirit
of despotism on the thrones of Europe, with which the light-hearted
Congress of Vienna, after all the long terrors of the war, had
thought it could easiest settle all the troubles of the
day—at the same time securing for the ruling powers the
return of all those pomps and pleasures which the end of the last
century seemed to have buried for ever. And now all at once the
terrible spirit of the great French Revolution, to which all those
princely pleasures had fallen victim, seemed about to reappear in
their own country: the "deutscher Jüngling" was
looked upon as a Jacobin; and the fear of a national
spirit thus misconceived and misinterpreted was the only thing
which the rulers of
Precisely what the German rulers had been led to fear by their
pitiable misconception of the noble aspirations of Young Germany,
became, through their own policy, which cut the very ground from
under their feet, a thing seriously to be feared. The
German youth, mistaken for a "Jacobin," must of
necessity be driven by this policy into a kind of counterfeit
Jacobinism. The spirit of freedom was once for all aroused, and was
striving to realize its aims. If it could not do this in a way
befitting the genius of the nation and the nation's needs,
there were the new international methods to offer it a
welcome channel for its expression. Naturally and independently
developed in true German fashion, out of the nobly enthusiastic
heart of Young Germany, it might have helped the country to a true
national culture, embodying all that was best in it. The old
beautiful loyalty between prince and people might have been revived
in its full vigor. But the idea of liberty came with its foreign
signification, as a resistance to something, and in this
form secretly took more and more hold upon the minds of Germans,
who no longer had a Fatherland in which they could feel themselves
at home. The French idea of revolution, proclaiming itself
as a kind of international panacea, began to seem the true way to
be rid of every national evil, and was exchanged, in the minds of
the German people, longing for an ideal freedom, for the
significance—so shamefully
It was at this eventful time, at the beginning of the fourth
decade of our century, that, as a boy of seventeen, I made my first
real entry into life; to feel, with all the strength of a
peculiarly receptive nature, all the wonderful impressions it
conveyed. I was never a marvel of musical precocity; at a very
early age a taste for poetry had struggled with a taste for music,
for the mastery in my mind. It was only the knowledge of
Beethoven's symphonies, gained when I was a boy of fifteen,
that first decided me finally and passionately in favor of music;
though it had always (especially through Weber's
"Freischütz") had the strongest effect upon me. In
my boyhood, which was passed in Dresden, I had seen the revered
composer of this incomparable work (Weber was then a Kapellmeister
in the city), and had even met him at our house; and the touching
picture of his spiritual, shadowy figure, joined with the powerful,
vivid effect of his composition as I had heard it on the stage, had
left upon my mind an impression too deep to be forgotten.
Beethoven's symphonies, to which, though entirely without any
special musical study, I devoted myself with passionate enthusiasm,
finally gave music in my eyes a fairly supernatural power (eine
ganz dämonische Macht), which, it seemed to me, I could
not measure by any ordinary outward standard. Their harmonies and
movements appeared to me rather like ghostly, spiritual forces,
which seemed to address themselves to me individually, and to take
on the most fantastic shapes. The knowledge taught me as
pedantically and dryly as possible at school was, of course, of no
avail against a power of such strange fascinations. I had suddenly
become a musician, though, at the same time, my instinct of poetic
imitation, which I had even as a child practiced on Shakespeare and
the antique tragedies, did not quite leave me. It sought rather to
pay a tribute, however small, in the shape of some
libretti which I composed, to the mighty Dæmon of
music that had so taken possession of me.
Returning to my native city of Leipsic, and for the first time really beginning life there, I saw with amazement how great had been the effects, even there, of the Paris Revolution of July, 1830—effects which showed themselves in students' insurrections and in riots among the working classes. My young blood, for the first time fully aroused, hurried me into the ranks of the students, whose society seemed to me a marvelous realization of my ideas of liberty and vigor, and among whom I soon had a right to count myself as a regularly professed student of music. At the same time the Polish insurrection also began to have its exciting effect upon me. Polish emigrants, haughty, handsome men, who fascinated me and filled me with the deepest sympathy for the sad fate of their country, came to Leipsic, and I became acquainted with numbers of them. All this wrought more and more upon my mind, both in fancy and reality.
Meanwhile I had ventured into the light of publicity as a
composer. The impressions of Weber's and Beethoven's
music, which were so vivid a part of my being, and stimulated me to
attempts at imitation, were not, as I had soon to confess, so
easily to be reproduced in any reasonably adequate way, without a
regular study of musical theory. At length, therefore, I
threw myself into this study with an ardor that in a relatively
short time gave me complete self-reliance in the use of musical
laws and forms. My first opera, "The Fairies," which I
now composed, to a text written by myself from a legend by Gozzi,
was entirely in the romantic style of Weber and Marschner. But the
high art-ideals which I held were soon to receive an irresistible
shock from the increasing influences of real life. The same
elements which had only appealed to my fancy in the results of the
revolutionary movements in the countries about me, now roused my
over-fiery youthful blood as I found them again in the works of
Heinse, which I had begun to read with great avidity. He was the
apostle of a kind of unlimited æsthetic sensuousness; and I
gained the same ideas from my acquaintance with that new school of
"young German" literature, which attacked with fiery
vehemence the life of old Germany, now exhausted and
moribund under the weight of political oppression. One writer of
this school, Heinrich Laube, the author of "Young
Europe," was at that time my personal friend.
Added to all this came the impression made upon me by a
benefit-performance given in Leipsic by the great dramatic artist
Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient, whose talents converted
Bellini's
Under the influence of this storm of superabundant youthful
vitality I passed into the period in which it may be said that I
sowed my musical "wild oats"—a phase which I can
not call a change in my character or even taste, but rather an
awakening to the importance of what was living and vigorous. The
result of this condition was the writing and composition of a
second opera—this time entirely in the French and even in
the Italian style—the "Love-Veto"—a wild,
revolutionary, recklessly sensuous transformation of
Shakespeare's serious "Measure for Measure."
Music had now become a living thing to me, instead of a mystery;
but how different a thing from what, in the days when it had seemed
a mystery, I had imagined it! And yet this new life which it had
assumed, by transferring it to the actual stage of a theatre,
accomplished precisely what I had longed for in that earlier time.
What I had still to attain was the true ideal form in
which this new life, so indispensable to the perfection of my art,
must be embodied.
I now began the practical professional life of a musician, as
conductor at some of the city theatres, and had ample opportunity
to revel at pleasure in my new element. I found myself ardently
absorbing the fresh, light, and volatile art of the day, to
reproduce it with equal ardor in my own work. Thus, even within the
narrow
This movement was to have still greater successes and results in
the domain of music. Here the foreign, un-German element had been a
decided—even an unresisted—victor over the few
imitative, distorted remnants of our great national art. The
lively, sparkling compositions of Auber and Rossini, the best
fruits of the French and Italian style, now ruled the German stage;
works in which really national characteristics and great talents
found most charming expression, and which culminated in the musical
glorification of the idea of revolution, as in "La Muette de
Portici" (Masaniello) and in "William
Tell." But this was not enough. That race of go-betweens must
once more, and at exactly the right moment, give us a man of
peculiar talents, whose task it was to complete the estrangement of
the Germans from the art that was peculiarly their own. This
man—who put upon the stage, with every appliance of show and
glitter, and with all the refinements of theatrical effect, the
highest development of the most effective modern
art-elements—a Mischmasch of all styles and methods
in the form of the great "Historical Opera"—this
man was Meyerbeer. From Beethoven's symphonies to
Meyerbeer's opera—what a fearful stride is this!
But though in this department of art there was now nothing but
coarseness and triviality, there was another direction in which a
finer taste and a real artistic talent revived among us, and did
its best, also, to settle our account with the great
past—a past which it found rather uncomfortable to look back
upon. Here, too, a member of that ubiquitous, talented race took
the lead. Mendelssohn undertook with his delicate hand—his
exquisite special talent for a kind of musical
landscape-painting—to lead the educated classes of Germany as
far away from the dreaded and misunderstood extravagances of a
Beethoven, and from the sublime prospect opened to national art by
his later works, as from those rude theatrical orgies which his
more refined taste so detested in the historical opera of his
fellow-Hebrew. He was the savior of music in the
salon—and with him the concert-room, and now and
then even the church, did duty as a salon also. Amid all
the tempests of revolution he gave to his art a delicate, smooth,
quiet, cool, and agreeably tranquil form that excited nobody, and
had no aim but to please the modern cultivated taste, and to give
it occasionally, amid the shifting and turmoil of the times, the
consolation of a little pleasing and elegant entertainment. A new
idea in art was developed—the embodiment in it of a graceful,
good-society element,
genre painter to the other's landscape—now
began to write symphonies, oratorios, and operas. The educated
German—who no longer believed in a great living national art,
but in his vague longing for political freedom was very fond of
using empty phrases about the now forgotten "German
element"—saw in these works the noble achievements of
a truly reawakened "German art-spirit"; and,
contrasting them with the prevailing crude realism and trivial
sensuousness of the "international" art which he saw
presented to the public, he felt himself bound to admire them
enthusiastically when he heard them performed in the more exclusive
concert-room. Thus the German intellect degenerated into a
condition of complete unproductiveness in art, severing the living
and active bonds that bound it to a great national past, and
undertaking to create, unaided, an art intended only for
"amateurs" and "connoisseurs."
I could not feel myself drawn toward such an art. The crudest
realism that contained an element of true strength had more
attraction for me—seemed more at one with my ideas. Even the
"great historical opera," the culminating point of the
foreign taste that had migrated into Germany, where it had been
transformed into the very reverse of its original form, and had
taken on much that was repulsive and unnatural—even this
caught my attention for a time. I saw in it the greatest
development that the rich accessories of art could attain, in the
effort to produce a combined dramatic and musical effect; and even
this was higher than mere tediousness and emptiness. I did not yet
appreciate the fact that this whole school must, of necessity, be
wanting in all ideal tendencies; I thought that this want
resulted only from the erroneous method of one particular artist. I
endeavored to elevate myself above the triviality and coarseness of
this strangely attractive phase of art; and with this aim I wrote
and composed my "Rienzi" in the same form—as an
historic opera—and with an even greater use of all possible
theatrical effects. The same revolutionary fire showed in
living, they necessarily led me away from my
German fatherland. There I saw no possible chance for the
production of my new work—only fitted, as it was, to be
produced upon the largest scale, and with the most ample
accessories. What was this Germany to me, whose most important and
most vigorous works were, after all, only importations from abroad?
The desire seized me to go myself into the outside world whence
these things came; impelled me—and this is especially
characteristic of my whole feeling—to go straight to the
center of this modern life—to Paris itself. It was there that
my eyes were to be opened to the sacrifice that I had made to the
tendencies of the day; and there, too, that I was to become fully
conscious of that longing for the ideal which was already
awakening within me, and which was later to bring me to my home
again, and to bring my home to me.
Almost entirely without money, and with hardly even the
necessary acquaintance with the French language, I started, under
the impulse of my hasty decision, and reached my goal after an
extraordinarily protracted voyage, in a sailing ship, from the
Russian shore of the Baltic by way of England. How soon I had to
realize that here in Paris it was literally impossible for a
stranger, without means or introduction, to make himself known in
any way! After countless vain attempts to gain a hearing from
influential people, I was glad to barely support life by the most
menial labor. My great opera, the goal of my wishes, still hovered
before me, with all its seductive splendors, during this time of
utter wretchedness and poverty; I saw about me the very rich and
brilliant accessories I needed for it; but saw them thrown away on
the enviably exact and correct production of petty and artificial
art-works, and ruled by the useless dilettantism of spiritless
music. Of any real living element of national feeling, such as is
embodied in a truly noble art, I found nothing here any more than
elsewhere; the spirit that had penetrated from abroad like a
life-giving current into my own sadly lifeless country seemed here
to be fenced about with conventional forms, to be inaccessible to
every one who was not fortunate enough to belong among the
protégés of the powers which alone
controlled all art matters. It grew more and more obvious to me
In this foreign land I heard for the first time, under
Habeneck's admirable leadership at the Conservatoire, really
finished performances of Beethoven's symphonies. The
long-lost wonder-world of my youth opened again to my manhood,
seeming once more like a blessed reality amid a maze of shifting,
ghostly dreams. Inspired by such experiences, I again composed a
serious symphonic work in the pure German style—"A
Faust Overture" (eine Faust Ouvertüre), and
began the writing and composition of a new and dramatic
work—thoroughly romantic and thoroughly German in
spirit—which I finished in an extraordinarily short time. On the
voyage to England, along the Scandinavian coast, I had heard for
the first time from the sailors the remarkable legend of the
"Flying Dutchman"—that ghostly mariner,
compelled by a terrible curse to wander over the seas, ever seeking
for home, and seeking it in vain. I felt myself overcome by the
same fearful loneliness in the midst of the great ocean of a
foreign land, and filled with a mighty longing for the home that
now seemed to me transformed and glorified. The adaptation of this
romantic legend led me into a new direction in my artistic
development—a direction which was truly German and truly
ideal, and in which a singular stroke of fortune was soon to help
me on still farther. For here, among strangers, I was for the first
time to become acquainted with the great world of German legend. I
read the story of "Tannhäuser," and this
sympathetic, tragic figure made a powerful impression upon me, and
showed me—especially when I connected it with the
"Sängerkrieg" on the Wartburg—the possible
material of a great, seriously-conceived musical drama. I also read
the old German poem on this "Sängerkrieg," and
found added to it the legend of Lohengrin. A new world opened
before me. Here was the ideal form suddenly offered to me
in all its glory—that form which, in the world about me,
however brilliant and great it seemed, could have so little part
The work which I conceived could never take its place, I knew, upon a stage controlled by the world-ruling "grand opera," could never find its production in this place to which my madness had brought me—this center of a modern life which was satisfied with the art it found there. It was on German soil, the soil of my own home, toward which I was now drawn by the most passionate longing, that the art I dreamed of could alone take root. I had yet to learn that this home was but an ideal which existed only in my imagination, and which the reality was very far from fulfilling.
And now a most miraculous thing happened. In the midst of my longing there actually came from Germany a summons—to me, the utterly unknown! My "Rienzi," which I had sent home in despair—my work that I had composed only with a view to its performance abroad, and that I had already given up—had brought me into notice in Germany. In Dresden, where my beloved master, Weber, had lived and labored, my opera had been accepted and was to be brought out at once. And the German artist, now a man of thirty, hastily gathered together the results of his experience in the foreign capital, and carrying with him "The Flying Dutchman" and the schemes of "Tannhäuser" and "Lohengrin," hurried back, filled with happy hopes, across the Rhine to his now regained Fatherland.