soon to learn that all this did not by any means suffice; for, to my horror, at the first performance, that which had strangely escaped my notice in the rehearsals became suddenly apparent to me.  At the close of the Sangerkrieg, when Tannhauser (in frantic excitement, and forgetful of everybody present) has to sing his praise to Venus, and I saw Tichatschek moving towards Elizabeth and addressing his passionate outburst to her, I thought of Schroder-Devrient’s warning in very much the same way as Croesus must have thought when he cried, ‘O Solon!  Solon!’ at the funeral pyre.  In spite of the musical excellence of Tichatschek, the enormous life and melodic charm of the Sangerkrieg failed entirely.

On the other hand, I succeeded in calling into life an entirely new element such as probably had never been seen in opera!  I had watched the young baritone Mitterwurzer with great interest in some of his parts—­he was a strangely reticent man, and not at all sociably inclined, and I had noticed that his delightfully mellow voice possessed the rare quality of bringing out the inner note of the soul.  To him I entrusted Wolfram, and I had every reason to be satisfied with his zeal and with the success of his studies.  Therefore, if I wished my intention and method to become known, especially in regard to this difficult Sangerkrieg, I had to rely on him for the proper execution of my plans and everything they involved.  I began by going through the opening song of this scene with him; but, after I had done my utmost to make him understand how I wanted it done, I was surprised to find how very difficult this particular rendering of the music appeared to him.  He was absolutely incapable of repeating it after me, and with each renewed effort his singing became so commonplace and so mechanical that I realised clearly that he had not understood this piece to be anything more than a phrase in recitative form, which he might render with any inflections of the voice that happened to be prescribed, or which might be sung either this way or that, according to fancy, as was usual in operatic pieces.  He, too, was astonished at his own want of capacity, but was so struck by the novelty and the justice of my views, that he begged me not to try any more for the present, but to leave him to find out for himself how best to become familiar with this newly revealed world.  During several rehearsals he only sang in a whisper in order to get over the difficulty, but at the last rehearsal he acquitted himself so admirably of his task, and threw himself into it so heartily, that his work has remained to this day as my most conclusive reason for believing that, in spite of the unsatisfactory state of the world of opera to-day, it is possible not only to find, but also properly to train, the singer whom I should regard as indispensable for a correct interpretation of my works.  It was through the impression made by Mitterwurzer that I ultimately succeeded in making the public understand the whole of my work.  This man, who had utterly changed himself in bearing, look, and appearance in order to fit himself to the role of Wolfram, had, in thus solving the problem, not only become a thorough artist, but by his interpretation of his part had also proved himself my saviour at the very moment when my work was threatening to fail through the unsatisfactory result of the first performance.