Page:The Reminiscences of Carl Schurz (Volume Two).djvu/89

 those tender accents of love or delight floating above and through the accompaniment which lifted the melody in a poetic cloud. When the last notes of the “Tannhäuser” overture had died away, I sat still, unable to say anything articulate. I felt only that an entirely new musical world had opened and revealed itself to me, the charms of which I could not possibly resist. My good friend Frau Kinkel noticed well what had happened to me. She looked at me sadly and said with a sigh, “I see, I see! You are now a captive, too. And so it goes. What will become of our art?”

Indeed, I was a captive, and I remained one. It so happened that many years, nearly thirty, elapsed before I heard any Wagner music again, except some transcriptions for the piano which were naturally but feeble echoes of the orchestral score, and a single representation of “Lohengrin” in the little theater of Wiesbaden. But when at last during those memorable seasons of German Opera in New York, beginning in 1885, I had the happiness of witnessing the wonderful Nibelungen-Ring tetralogy, and “Tristan and Isolde,” and the “Meistersinger,” and when, still later, I heard “Parsifal” in Bayreuth, the impressions I received were no less powerful and profound than had been that first which I have just described. I did not care to study Wagner's theories of the “Music-Drama,” or, by deciphering the printed scores, to dive into the mysterious depths of his harmonic elaborations. I simply gave myself up to the sensations stirred in me by what I heard and saw. The effects produced on me were perfectly free from the influence of preconceived opinion or affectation—in other words, they were entirely unbidden, unprepared, natural, irresistible. I did not lose my appreciation of Bach, Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Chopin, and other music-poets. But here was something apart—something