in opening a hopeful refuge to my art. He ceased his wanderings,
settled down at the small, modest Weimar, and took up the
conductor's baton, after having been at home so long in the
splendour of the greatest cities of Europe. At Weimar I saw him
for the last time, when I rested a few days in Thuringia, not yet
certain whether the threatening prosecution would compel me to
continue my flight from Germany. The very day when my personal
danger became a certainty, I saw Liszt conduct a rehearsal of my
"Tannhauser", and was astonished at recognizing my second-self in
his achievement. What I had felt in inventing this music he felt
in performing it; what I wanted to express in writing it down he
proclaimed in making it sound. Strange to say, through the love
of this rarest friend, I gained, at the moment of becoming
homeless, the real home for my art, which I had longed for and
sought for always in the wrong place.

"At the end of my last stay in Paris, when ill, miserable, and
despairing, I sat brooding over my fate, my eye fell on the score
of my "Lohengrin", totally forgotten by me. Suddenly I felt
something like compassion that this music should never sound from
off the death-pale paper. Two words I wrote to Liszt; his answer
was the news that preparations for the performance were being
made on the largest scale the limited means of Weimar would
permit. Everything that men and circumstances could do was done
in order to make the work understood. Success was his reward, and
with this success he now approaches me, saying, 'Behold we have
come so far; now create us a new work that we may go still
further.'"

Wagner's words, as above quoted, may have seemed an exaggerated