Wagner’s letters to Liszt and other friends show that he suffered tortures, and was often brought to the verge of suicide by the thought that, as a political refugee, he was unable to go to Germany to superintend the production of his works.  His one consolation was that, as he put it, through the friendship of Liszt his art had found a home at Weimar at the moment when he himself became homeless.  Weimar became, as it were, a sort of preliminary Bayreuth, to which pilgrimages were made to hear Wagner’s operas.  Liszt not only produced the “Flying Dutchman,” “Tannhaeuser,” and “Lohengrin,” but wrote eloquent essays on them, and in every possible way advanced the good cause.  It has been justly said that by his efforts he accelerated the vogue of Wagner’s operas fully ten years.  He also helped him pecuniarily, and induced others to do the same.  Never in the world’s history has one artist done so much for another as Liszt did for Wagner during all the years of his exile in Switzerland.

Few persons would consider residence in Switzerland (the usual home in those days of political refugees) a special hardship; nor would Wagner have considered it in that light except for the solicitude he felt for the children of his brain.  Otherwise he greatly enjoyed life in that glorious country, and the Alpine ozone nourished and stimulated his brain.  Moreover, from the creative point of view, it was an actual advantage for him to be away from the opera-houses of the great capitals.  In Switzerland, except for a short time when he was connected with the Zurich opera, he heard no operatic music except such as his own brain created.  Undoubtedly this helps to account for the astounding originality of the music-dramas he wrote in Switzerland.

These music-dramas go as far beyond “Lohengrin” in certain directions as “Lohengrin” goes beyond the operas of Wagner’s predecessors.  It was a reckless thing to do, to make another such giant stride before the world had caught up with his first, and he had to suffer the consequences; but genius disregards prudence, and looks to the future alone.  What he was now writing was what his enemies tauntingly called “the music of the future,” because, as they said, nobody liked it at present; but what he himself called the “art work of the future,” in which all the fine arts are inseparably united.

The biggest of his works, the “Nibelung Tetralogy,” was conceived and for the most part written in Switzerland.  Before leaving Dresden he had already written the poem of an opera which he called “Siegfried’s Death.”  Returning to this in his exile he came to the conclusion, gradually, that the legend on which it is based, and which he had sketched out in prose at the beginning, contained the material for two, three, nay, four operas.  Accordingly, he wrote the poems of these:  first, “Goetterdaemmerung,” then “Siegfried,” “Die Walkuere,” and “Rheingold.”  The music to these four dramas was, however, composed in the reverse order, in which they were to be performed.