whom were Uhlig, Pohl, Cornelius, Raff and Ambros. These practical
performances, as little as they presented an artistic ensemble, yet
tended to arouse and shape talents that Wagner could avail himself of
later for his own higher purposes. Among them were Milde and his wife,
Ander, Schnorr, Formes, Niemann and Beck. Wagner's niece Johanna, was
already familiar with his method from her Dresden experience. He
endeavored in a pamphlet discussing the way to perform "Tannhaeuser"
to rescue it from banishment and familiarize the artists with its
merits but they remained deaf or hostile. He became absorbed the more
in his Nibelungen-poem, leaving to his good genius his deliverance
from external isolation. And yet the latter became a source of
pleasure when, in the manner of von Eschenbach's Parcival, who also
presented the sorrows and deeds of the mythical sun-hero, familiar to
him since 1845, he undertook to portray the forest-solitude in which
his young Siegfried grew up and gained all the miraculous power of
nature, above all, that inner confidence which banishes fear from the
human breast.

A brighter future seemed to open when, notwithstanding the doubts of
his friends of the ultimate success of his "monstrous undertaking,"
the knowledge of which began to spread, the German artists generally
accepted his invitation to spend a Wagner week in Zurich, and parts
of his masterly works were performed with such effect that "the
amiable maestro stood buried in flowers." For the overture to the
"Flying Dutchman," as well as for the prelude to "Lohengrin," he
composed an explanatory introduction.

In the autumn of the same year he was in Italy, and, lying sleepless
in a hotel at La Speccia, he found for the first time those plastic
"nature-motives" which in the Nibelungen-trilogy with constantly
increasing individuality are made the exponents of the passions and
the characters which give expression to them. He immediately returned
to his dreary, involuntary home to proceed with the completion of his
colossal work, which was to engage his attention for many years. A
visit from Liszt, in October, led to a profounder understanding of
Beethoven's last sonatas, so that their language was fully identified
with his own. "Rheingold" and the "Walkuere" were soon finished.

His fame meanwhile grew steadily. He received an invitation for the
concerts of the Philharmonic society in London, for which Beethoven
had written the Ninth Symphony