friendly and obliging in itself, could not but wound me in the then state of my mind.  I never repeated my first call on Liszt, and, without knowing or even wishing to know him, I was prone to look on him as strange and adverse to my nature.  My repeated expression of this feeling was afterward told to him, just at the time when my “Rienzi” at Dresden was attracting general attention.  He was surprised to find himself misunderstood with such violence by a man whom he had scarcely known, and whose acquaintance now seemed not without value to him.  I am still moved when I think of the repeated and eager attempts he made to change my opinion of him, even before he knew any of my works.  He acted not from any artistic sympathy, but led by the purely human wish of discontinuing a casual disharmony between himself and another being; perhaps he also felt an infinitely tender misgiving of having really hurt me unconsciously.  He who knows the selfishness and terrible insensibility of our social life, and especially of the relations of modern artists to each other, can not be struck with wonder, nay, delight, with the treatment I received from this remarkable man....  At Weimar I saw him for the last time, when I was resting for a few days in Thuringia, uncertain whether the threatening persecution would compel me to continue my flight from Germany.  The very day when my personal danger became a certainty, I saw Liszt conducting a rehearsal of my ‘Tannhouser,’ 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 had wanted to express in writing it down, he expressed in making it sound.  Strange to say, through the love of this rarest friend, I gained, at the very moment of becoming homeless, a real home for my art which I had hitherto longed for and sought for 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,’ which I had totally forgotten.  Suddenly I felt something like compassion that this music should never sound from off the death-pale paper.  Two words I wrote to Liszt; the answer was that preparation was being made for the performance on the grandest scale which the limited means of Weimar permitted.  Everything that man or circumstances could do was done to make the work understood....  Errors and misconceptions impeded the desired success.  What was to be done to supply what was wanted, so as to further the true understanding on all sides and, with it, the ultimate success of the work?  Liszt saw it at once, and did it.  He gave to the public his own impression of the work in a manner the convincing eloquence and overpowering efficacy of which remain unequaled.  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 farther.’”