II

Parsifal having proved a tremendous success, Wagner went to work to arrange for another festival.  He had still a thousand opera plans bubbling in his brain; doubtless, with his unconquerable vitality, he imagined he had twenty years of life before him; he meant to make a financial success of Bayreuth and to go on.  The end came with awful unexpectedness.  He went to Venice, conducted there his boyish Symphony in C, worked away at his Parsifal arrangements; his heart ruptured and he died on February 13, 1883.  He had lived the perfectly rounded life, achieved the three-score-and-ten, done everything that a man can do, and gone through more experiences than most men suffer.  His death sent a shudder through Europe:  one had come to think that such a man could not possibly die.  Swinburne wrote that we heard the news as “a prophet who hears the word of God and may not flee.”  His vilest detractors laid their homage at the dead man’s feet.  His widow laid her hair by his head.  He was buried at his Villa Wahnfried, and rests there for ever.  Had ever such a life so perfectly beautiful an ending?  We must regard Parsifal as the last sad quaverings of a beloved friend:  after that came peace, immortal peace.

III

Amongst musicians of the first rank stand four commanding, tremendous figures.  First comes Handel, by far the greatest personality of them all:  him I beg permission to think the greatest man who has yet lived—­greater than Caesar or Napoleon.  After him came Gluck, a triumphant bourgeois; then Beethoven, whose domination was the result of his supreme genius and his bad temper; and, last, Wagner, whose supreme genius and indomitable perseverance made him either an idol or a terror to all who came in contact with him.  Handel had an easy time; he was of his period, he wrote for it, and only his native pugnacity landed him in bankruptcy, and enabled him finally to win a fortune by oratorio when no one would listen any longer to his operas.  Gluck was from the first a popular composer:  there were rows, it is true, but they did not concern him; he had always an assured public.  Beethoven had throughout his working life an ample pension and the friendship of princes.  Wagner had no such friends until he was sixty years old; he had no pension; he offended every opera director in Germany by telling those gentry that they knew nothing of their business; he got mixed up with revolutionists, and, mainly because he was a man of unusual ability, was regarded as dangerous by every bureaucrat.  He was fast becoming a popular composer; and he left his successes behind him and went on to change opera in a fashion never attempted by Gluck or any other composer.  He was the most consummate contrapuntist of his age:  therefore the critics and professors declared he knew nothing about counterpoint.  He wrote the loveliest melodies