the Grand Opéra, and with "Rienzi" in his carpet bag.

Whilst here he playfully seized the musical motive of the English people. It lay, he said, in the five consecutive ascending notes (after the first three) of "Rule Britannia:" there was expressed the whole breadth and downright bluff "go" of the British nation. He threw "Rule Britannia" into an overture, and sent it by post to Sir George Smart, then omnipotent musical professor in London; but the postage being insufficient, the MS. was not taken in, and at this moment is probably lying in some dim archive of the Post Office, "left till called for."

Crossing to Dieppe, he met the crafty and clever Meyerbeer, who instantly saw the man he had to deal with, and probably conceived in a moment that policy of apparent support and slow intrigue which made him throughout life Wagner's meanest and bitterest foe.

Wagner passed two terrible years, 1840-42, in Paris. Meyerbeer had given him introductions, and introduced him later to M. Joly, a stage director at Paris, whom he knew to be on the point of bankruptcy, and who suspended the rehearsal of the "Novice of Palermo" at the last moment. But this was but the end of a series of checks. He wrote an overture to "Faust." His good friend and faithful ally, Schlesinger, editor of the Gazette Musicale, got it rehearsed at the Conservatoire. It sounded quite too strange and queer to those ears polite, and was instantly snuffed out.

He submitted a libretto, "Love Forbidden," to a theatrical manager, but it had not a chance, and dropped. Schlesinger now employed him to write, and he wrote articles and novels, and so kept body and soul together. No one would listen to his music, but he was not a bad hack, and was hired for a few francs to arrange Halévy's Queen of Cyprus" for the piano, and the latest tunes of Donizetti and Bellini for piano and cornet à piston.

66

At night, he stole into the Grand Opera, and there, as he tells us, felt quite certain that his own works would one day supersede the popular efforts of Rossini and Meyerbeer. He does not seem to have been dejected like a lesser soul; in what the French called his immense orgueil, he was sorry for their want of

appreciation, but never dreamed of altering his ideas to suit them. "Je me flattais," says the unpaid musical hack, "d'imposer les miennes." Meanwhile the splendid band of the Conservatoire, under Habeneck, consoled him, and on the Boulevards he often met and chatted with Auber, for whom he had a sincere respect and admiration. Auber was at least a conscientious musician of genius, who knew his business, and did not debase what was at no time a very exalted but still a legitimate branch of his art, the opéra comique; and besides, Auber was a bon camarade, and liked Wagner, probably without understanding him.

After months of drudgery, and chiefly penny-a-lining for the Gazette Musicale, Wagner felt the imperious necessity for a return to his own art. He took a little cottage outside Paris, hired a piano, and shut himself up. He had done for a time, at least, with the mean, frivolous, coarse world of Paris-he did not miss his friends, he did not mind his poverty. He was again on the wild Norwegian coast, beaten about with storms, and listening to the weird tales of mariners, as in broken and abrupt utterances, or with bated breath, they confided to him the legend common in one form or other to seafaring folk in all parts of the world

the legend of the Flying Dutchman. The tale sprang from the lives and adventures of those daring navigators of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, and reflects the desperate struggle with the elements, the insatiable thirst for the discovery of new lands athwart unknown seas; and it seems to embody for ever the avenging vision of men who, resolved to win, had so often dared and lost all.

A famous captain, mad to double the Cape of Storms, beaten back again and again, at length swears a mighty oath to persevere throughout eternity. The devil takes him at his word. The captain doubles the Cape, but is doomed to rove the seas for ever from pole to pole, -as the Wandering Jew to tread the earth,-his phantom vessel the terror of all mariners, and the dreadful herald of shipwreck. Here was a legend which needed but one inspired touch of love to make it a grand epitome of seafaring life, with its hard toils, its forlorn hopes, and its tender and ineffably sweet respites. The accursed doom of the Fly

ing Dutchman can be lifted by human love alone. The captain, driven by an irrepressible longing for rest, must land once in seven years, and if he can find a woman who will promise to be his and remain faithful to him for one term of seven years, his trial will be over-he will be saved.

The legend thus humanized becomes the vehicle for the expression of those intense yet simple feelings and situations which popular myth, according to Wag ner, has the property of condensing into universal types. Immense unhappiness, drawn by magnetic attraction to immense love, tried by heartrending doubt and uncertainty, and crowned with fidelity and triumphant love, the whole embodied in a clear, simple story, summed up in a few situations of terrible strength and inexorable truth,-such is Wagner's conception of the drama of the "Flying Dutchman," with its "damnation" motive belonging to the captain, and its "salvation" motive given to the bride-its sailor's subject-its pilot's song-its spinning-wheel home-melody-and its stormy "Ho! e ho!" chorus;-and the whole, shadowed forth in the magic and tempestuous overture, stands out as this composer's first straightforward desertion of history proper, and adoption of myth as the special medium of the new Musical Drama.

Six weeks of ceaseless labor, which to Wagner were weeks of spontaneous and joyful production, sufficed to complete the music of the "Flying Dutchman." The immediate result in Paris was ludicrous. The music was instantly judged to be absurd, and Wagner was forced to sell the libretto, which was handed over to a Frenchman, M. P. Fouché, who could write music. It appeared with that gentleman's approved setting, under the title of "Le Vaisseau Fantôme."

This was enough! No lower depth could well be reached, and Wagner was preparing to leave Paris to the tender mercies of Rossini, Meyerbeer, and M. P. Fouché, when news reached him from Germany that "Rienzi," flouted in the capital of taste, had been accepted in Berlin and Dresden !

tide for Wagner. He hurried to Dresden, to find the rehearsals of "Rienzi" already advanced. The opera was produced with that singular burst of enthusiasm which greets the first appreciation of an important but long-neglected truth, and Wagner, having become the favorit e of the Crown Prince, was elected Kapellmeister at Dresden, and found himself for the first time famous. Some might now have rested on their laurels, but to Wagner's imperious development "Rienzi" was already a thing of the past. He had drunk of the crystalline waters of popular myth, and was still thirsty. The "Flying Dutchman" had opened up a new world to him, more real because more exhaustive of human feelings and character than the imperfect types and broken episodes of real history. He seemed to stand where the fresh springs of inspiration welled up from a virgin soil; he listened to the child-like voices of primitive peoples, inspired from the simple heart of Nature, and babbling eternal verities without knowing it. Legend was the rough ore-the plastic element he could seize and remould, as Eschylus remoulded Prometheus, or Sophocles Edipus, adding philosophic analysis and the rich adornments of poetic fancy and artistic form.

The legend of Tannhäuser now engrossed him. The drama was soon conceived and written. There he summed up, in a few glowing scenes, the opposition between that burst of free sensuous life at the Renascence, and the hard, narrow ideal of Papal Christianity. Christ not only crowned with thorns, but turned into stone, is all the answer that Christianity had to give to that stormy impulse which at last poured its long pent-up torrent over Europe. The deep revolt still stares us in the face from the Italian canvases, as we look at the sensuous figures of Raphael or Titian-the free types of fair breathing life, surrounded with the hard aureole of the artificial saint, or limned as in mockery, like the dreams of a pagan world upon the walls of the Vatican.

Tannhäuser, a Thuringian knight, taking refuge with Venus, no longer the beneficent Holda, joy of gods and men, but turned by the excesses of the ascetic spirit into a malign witch, and banished to the bowels of the earth in the

Venusberg-Tannhäuser, with a touch eternally true to nature, bursting the fetters of an unruly sensual life, and sighing for a healthier activity-Tannhäuser seeing for a moment only, in the pure love of Elizabeth, the reconciliation of the senses with the spirit, a reconciliation made for ever impossible by the stupid bigotry of a false form of religion, but which is ultimately sealed. and accomplished by love and death in heaven;-this is the human and sublime parable of the drama, wrought out with the fervor of a religious devotee, and epitomized in that prodigious overture wherein the dirge of the Church mingles with the free and impassioned song of the minstrel knight, and clashes wildly with the voluptuous echoes of the fatal Venusberg.

Wagner's progress was now checked by that storm of invective which burst out all over Germany-not on account of "Rienzi," but in consequence of the "Flying Dutchman," and especially of "Tannhäuser." The reason is simple. The power of "Rienzi," the audacity of its sentiment, the simplicity of its outline, and the realism of its mise en scène, together with a general respect for the old opera forms, ensured it a hearing which resulted in a real triumph. But in "Tannhäuser" the new path was already struck out, which singers, band, audience, critics, and composers, in a body, refused to tread-in short, aria, recitative, and ballet were dethroned, and suddenly found themselves servants where they had been masters.

In 1843, the "Flying Dutchman" was produced at Dresden, and failed. "Rienzi" was still revived with success. Wagner now sent the "Dutchman" and "Tannhäuser" to various theatres, The former was tried at Berlin in 1844, and failed. Spohr had the intelligene to take it up at Cassel, and wrote a friendly and appreciative letter to Wagner, but the MS. scores were, as a rule, returned by the other theatres, and the new operas seemed to react on the earlier success, for at Hamburgh "Rienzi" failed.

Meanwhile, failure, together with the close sympathy of a few devoted friends, convincing him that he was more right than ever, Wagner now threw himself into the completion of that work which is perhaps on the whole his most perfect,

as it certainly is his most popular creation, "Lohengrin." The superb acting and singing of Mdlles. Titiens, Nilsson, and Albani, will be fresh in the minds of many readers. The choruses in Eng land have never yet been up to the mark, but the band under Sir Michael Costa, at its best, renders the wondrous prelude to perfection.

The whole of "Lohengrin" is in that prelude. The descent of the Knight of the Swan from the jasper shrines of the sacred palace of Montsalvat, hidden away in a distant forest land-his holy mission to rescue Elsa from her false accusers-his high and chivalric lovehis dignified trouble at being urged by her to reveal his name, that insatiable feminine curiosity which wrecks the whole-the darker scenes of treachery by which Elsa is goaded to press her fatal inquiry-the magnificent climax of the first act-the sense of weird mystery that hangs about the appearance and reappearance of the swan, and the final departure of the glittering Knight of the Sangraal-allegory of heavenly devotion stooping to lift up human love and dashed with earth's bitterness in the attempt;-to those who understand the pathos, delicacy, and full intensity of the

Lohengrin" prelude, this and more will become as vivid as life and emotion can make it. "Lohengrin" in its elevation, alike in its pain, its sacrifice, and its peace, is the necessary reaction from that wreck of sensual passion and religious despair so vividly grasped in the scenes of the Venusberg, in the pilgrim chant and the wayside crucifix of "Tannhäuser."

VI.

'Lohengrin" was finished in 1847, but the political events of the next few years brought Wagner's career in Germany to an abrupt conclusion. His growing dissatisfaction with society coincided, unconsciously no doubt, with the failure of his operas after that first dawn of success. He now devoted himself to criticism and politics. He read Schopenhauer, whose pessimist philosophy did not tend to soothe his perturbed spirit; and during the next ten years, from 1847 to 1857, he spoke to the world from different places of exile in that series of political and æsthetical

pamphlets to which I have before alluded.

In 1855, owing to the earnest advocacy of M. Ferdinand Praeger, who for thirty years, through evil report and good report, has never ceased to support Wagner, the Philharmonic Society invited him over to London, and whilst here he conducted eight concerts. He was not popular he was surprised to find that the band thought it unnecessary to rehearse, and the band was surprised that he should require so much rehearsal. But he drove the band in spite of itself, and the band hated him. They said he murdered Beethoven with his bâton, because of the freedom and inspiration of his readings. Mendelssohn's Scotch symphony had been deliberately crushed, or it was the only thing that went, according to which paper you happened to read. He did not care for the press, and he was not much surprised that the press did not care for him. The unfailing musical intelligence of the Queen and Prince Albert was the one ray of sunlight in this his second visit to our inhospitable land, but the power of the man could not be hid even from his enemies; his culture astonished the half-educated musicians by whom he was surrounded, his brilliant originality impressed even his own friends, who saw him struggling through an imperfect acquaintance with French and English to make himself understood.

Thus Wagner passed through England for a second time, leaving behind him a vague impression of power and eccentricity, the first of which the musical press did its best to kill, whilst fanning the second into a devouring flame, which swallowed up Wagner's reputation. Notwithstanding Praeger's exertions, twenty-one years flitted by, and little enough was heard of Richard Wagner in this country until, owing to the increasing agitation of a younger school of musicians, foremost among whom we must name Mr. Edward Dannreuther and Mr. Walter Bache, the "Flying Dutchman" was at last indifferently produced at Covent Garden.

In 1874 Herr Hans von Bülow, pupil of Liszt and great exponent of Wagner's music, came over, and by his wonderful playing, aided steadily by the periodical Wagnerian and Liszt concerts given by

Messrs. Dannreuther and Bache, brought about the rise of the new Wagner movement in England, which received its development in the interest occasioned by the Bayreuth Festival, and reached its climax in the Wagner Festival actively promoted by Herr Wilhelmj, and undertaken by Messrs. Hodges and Essex, in 1877, at the Albert Hall.

I have anticipated a little, because space obliges me to draw briefly to the close of this sketch. Mina, Wagner's first wife, was now dead. I cannot here tell at length how Liszt (whose daughter, Cosima von Bülow, became Wagner's second wife in 1870) labored with untiring zeal to revive Wagner's works, and how his efforts were at last crowned with success all over Germany in 184950. It was a popular triumph. I remember old Cipriani Potter, the friend of Beethoven, saying to me at the time when the English papers teemed with the usual twaddle about Wagner's music being intelligible only to the few, "It is all very well to talk this stuff here, but in Germany it is the people, the common people, who crowd to the theatre when Tannhäuser' and 'Lohengrin' are given." I have noticed the same at the Covent Garden concerts; it was always the pit and gallery who called for the Wagner nights, whilst the opera which had the great run with Carl Rosa's English Company was the "Flying Dutchman," and "Tannhäuser" and "Lohengrin" at both the other houses were invariably the crowded nights.

In 1861 the Parisians showed their taste and chic by whistling "Tannhäuser" off the stage.

In 1863 Wagner appeared at Vienna, Prague, Leipsic, St. Petersburg, Moscow, Pesth, and conducted concerts with brilliant success. In 1864 his constant friend, the Crown Prince, now Ludwig II. of Bavaria, summoned him to Munich, where the new operas of "Tristan" in 1865, and "Meistersinger" in 1868, "Das Rheingold" in 1869, and

Die Walküre" in 1870, were successively given with ever-increasing appreciation and applause.

The "Meistersinger," through which there runs a strongly comic vein, deals with the contrast between the old stiff forms of minstrelsy by rule and the spontaneous revolt of a free, musical,

and poetical genius, and the work forms a humorous and almost Shaksperian pendant to the great and solemn minstrelsy which fills the centre of Tannhäuser. In Wagner's opinion it is the opera most likely to find favor with an English audience, a point which we hope an English audience may soon determine for itself.

"Tristan and Iseult," in which the drama and analysis of passion-love and death-is wrought up to its highest pitch, was thrown off between the two first and two last great sections of the Tetralogie, and the Tetralogie, itself planned twenty years ago and produced at Bayreuth in 1876, stands at present as the last most daring and complete manifestation of Wagner's dramatic, poetic, and musical genius.

The purpose and power of that great cycle of Scandinavian and German myths, unrolled in the four colossal dramas of "Rheingold," "Walküre," "Siegfried," and "Götterdämmerung," would carry me far beyond the limits of this article. Fragments only of the music can be presented in the concertroom, and these, bereft of the sister arts, must necessarily lose much of their effect. But after studying well the written drama, we may close our eyes and allow some of the Bayreuth scenes to flash once more before the mind's eye.

The elemental prelude of the "Rheingold," full of deep and slumbrous sound, wafts us away from all account of time and space. The dim grey-green depths of the Rhine alone become visible. We are aware of the deep moving of the Rhine water, and the three Undines are seen like faint shadows, swimming and singing, guardians of the Rheingold. The dark King of the Undergrounds comes climbing after them amongst the rocks, but he is scarcely visible in the gloom. Presently the Rheingold begins to brighten. A shaft of radiance strikes through the water-the Undines scream with joy; then through the whole depths of the Rhine streams an electric light, shining upon a distant rock, dimmed to softest yellow only by the water, and the famous "Rheingold! Rheingold!" wild cry of the Rhine daughters, breaks forth with the golden illumination of the Rhine depths.

Or let the curtain rise on the last fare

well duet between Brünnhild and the god Wotan. To long drawn-out enchanting melody Brünnhild's head sinks on her father's breast-she can but sob that she has loved him dutifully, and implore him if she is to become a mortal's bride to surround her rock with fire, and bar her from all but the bravest. It is now almost dark, a faint red light lingers on the supple yet lordly form of Brünnhild. A strange languor comes over her-the god lays her gently on the rock-and waves her into her long sleep. Then he calls for the fire-godand as he lifts his spear a burst of fire breaks out and runs round the stage-in another moment the whole background is an immense wall of rose-colored flame. To the most enchanting and dreamlike music of silver bells, harps, and flutes, the sleep of the Walküre begins - the god scales the rocks, stands for a moment in the midst of the fire, then passes through it out of sight as the curtain falls.

The

But, indeed, it is hard tc select. exquisite scene where Siegfried listens to the birds in the golden summer woods, and understands their language, the wild mountain rocks, and the war maidens rushing through the clouds, alighting and shouting to each other from peak to peak, or the passage of the gods over the rainbow-bridge into the halls of Walhalla, or, lastly, the death of Siegfried and the dusk of the gods;-the Albert Hall Festival will revive gleams of all these.

Long will that prodigious last scene of the "Götterdämmerung" linger in the memory of those who saw it at Bayreuth. Brünnhild draws the gold ring of the Rheingold-the cause of such grief and manifold pain-from her finger, and flings it back into the Rhine from whence it was stolen. Her black Walküre horse has been brought to her; she waves high a flaming torch, and casts it upon the bier of Siegfried. The flames rise in vast fiery columns. At that moment, in the lurid glow of the flaming pyre, the water, still flashing with moonlight behind, begins to surge up and advance upon the shore; and the Rhine daughters, singing the wildest Rhine music, are seen floating to and fro. Beyond, a ruddy light broadens until the distant sky discloses the courts of the Walhalla