'Meistersänger,' Wagner himself conducting. I may safely say I
think that I never experienced such absolute artistic rapture before
as at certain parts of this; for instance, in the overture, at one
place where the strings suddenly cease and there comes a peculiar
chromatic waft of wind instruments, like a ghostly voice rushing
across. I have never felt anything like it; it swept one right away,
and gave one a sense of deep ineffable satisfaction. I shall always
feel _for the future_ that there is an existent region, _into which
I have now actually penetrated_, in which that entire satisfaction
is possible, a fact which I have always hitherto doubted. It is
like an initiation.

"But I can not bear the 'Tannhäuser;' it seems to paint with a
fatal fascination the beauty of wickedness, the rightness, so to
speak, of sensuality. I feel after it as if I had been yielding to
a luscious temptation; unnerved, not inspired."

In another letter he writes, "Music is the most hopeful of the arts;
she does not hint only, like other expressions of beauty—she takes
you straight into a world of peace, a world where law and beauty are
the same, and where an ordered discord, that is discord working by
definite laws, is the origin of the keenest pleasure."

I remember, during the one London season which he subsequently went
through, his settling himself at a Richter concert next me with an
air of delight upon his face. "Now," he said, "let us try and
remember for an hour or two that we have souls."