When Tannhaeuser was published, Wagner sent the score to Schumann, and Mendelssohn also saw it.  The comment of the latter was characteristic:  he liked a canon entry in the finale of the second act; and indeed it was too much to hope that the successful purveyor of oratorios should like or in the least understand so mighty, fresh and passionate an opera.  He did not understand Beethoven, and virtually admitted as much without realizing how completely he had committed himself.  Moreover, opera was a form of art with which he had no real sympathy.  It is true his friend Devrient tells us that he was anxious to write one, and would have done so had not his fastidious taste prevented him ever finding a libretto to his liking—­which is equivalent to saying a man would have painted a fine picture could he only have secured a good subject.  In some respects Schumann was even more antipathetic.  Wagner, all who knew him declare, never ceased talking; Schumann was a silent man—­sometimes in a cafe a friend might speak to him:  Schumann would turn his back to the friend and his face to the wall, and continue to imbibe lager.  Wagner would talk for an hour, and, getting no response, go away; he would afterwards declare Schumann an “impossible” man, out of whom not a word could be got; while Schumann would declare he could not tolerate Wagner, “his tongue never stops.”  Schumann had no dramatic instinct, and no comprehension for opera; in Genoveva—­as, in fact, in his so-called dramatic cantatas—­he failed utterly:  he went straight through the words, setting them to music pur et simple, taking no thought for dramatic propriety.  The score of Tannhaeuser simply puzzled him; he saw in it only the music pur et simple, considered as which it was, of course, very bad.  It was not bad in all the ways he thought, however.  His remark about the clumsy orchestration long ago returned to roost.  For the rest, when he saw the opera performed he changed part of his mind, and wrote admitting that much which he did not like on paper seemed in place when the work was sung, and some of it “moved me much.”  Some time afterwards he played some of his music to Wagner, who found it muddled, as if the sustaining pedal was held down all the time—­and I have no doubt it was.  Another gentleman who saw the score was Hanslick, then a young man looking around for some one to attach himself to—­a peripatetic barnacle.  Later, he found Brahms, as all the world soon found out, and revised his early notions of the greater musician.  But at first he was all enthusiasm and gush, and wrote articles “explaining” Tannhaeuser.  However, his views are of no importance to-day.  Liszt, generous soul, had the opera played at Weimar at the earliest possible moment.

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CHAPTER IX

‘LOHENGRIN’

I