elements,
the former unfortunately of German origin, united in the effort to
make the work a failure when presented in the spring of 1861. The
history of art discloses nothing more discreditable. The gentlemen of
the Jockey-club with their dog-whistles in spite of the protests of
the audience succeeded in making the performances impossible and the
press declared the work merited such a fate! Wagner withdrew it after
the third performance and thereby incurred a heavy debt which it
required years of privation to liquidate. At the same time as far as
he personally was concerned the occurrence gave rise to a feeling of
joyous exaltation. The affair caused considerable excitement and
brought him, as he says, "into very important relations with the most
estimable and amiable elements of the French mind," and he discovered
that his ideal, being purely human, found followers everywhere. The
performances themselves could not have pleased him. "May all their
insufficiencies remain covered with the dust of those three
battle-evenings," he wrote shortly after to Germany.

He realized afresh that for the present his native land alone was the
place for a worthy presentation of his music and the enthusiasm which
he witnessed at a performance of "Lohengrin" in Vienna, then the
German imperial city, convinced him that the insult which had just
been offered to the German spirit was keenly felt. Vienna as well as
Carlsruhe now requested "Tristan," but the request was not conceded.
At a musicians' union which met in Weimar in August, 1861, under
Liszt's leadership, Wagner found that the better part of the German
artists had also measurably been converted to his views. These
experiences and the hope that with a humorous theme selected from
German life he might finally obtain possession of the domestic stage
and speak heart to heart to his dearly loved people and remind them
that even their every day life ought to be transfused with the spirit
of the ideal, prompted him to resurrect his "Mastersingers of
Nuremberg." It was in foreign Paris that he wrote, in the winter of
1862, the prize song of German life and art which enchants every true
German heart. This was the last work he created in a foreign land and
in a certain sense he freed himself with it from the sad recollections
of a banishment endured for more than ten years to reappear now "sound
and serene" before his nation. That this would finally come to pass
had always been his last s