Evening Republican, Volume 14, Number 2, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 3 January 1910 — WAGNER’S STORMY BEGINNING. [ARTICLE]

WAGNER’S STORMY BEGINNING.

i . Coinfort Came to Composer from Patronage of Had Monarch. “A fugitive for debt and fefußed a job in a chorus, a despised and abhorred and unheard composer, a political exile, then a stormy crusader against the widest and wildest campaign of abuse and ridicule in the history of art, then the most successful composer that ever lived, and finally again, a political exile because he had become so powerful that he was called the pope of music;—this is a scenario of the life of Waiter,” says Rupert Hiighes in Smith’s. “Though he chose music as his career and music is ordinarily the most aloof from reaJlty of all the arts, he brought it into intimate contact with nearly every phase of human activity. Through his music he invaded the drama, fiction, poetry, mythology, religion, legend, history, politics, revolution, finance, architecture, painting. “In the last article we followed Wagner’s life to the peak he reached with his overpoweringly beautiful romance, “Tristan and Isolde.” This opera was composed when Wagner was 46, but he was 61 before it was produced. “Mean While when his financial af 1 - fairs were in most desperate straits and he had borrowed nearly all that men like Liszt could scrape up to lend him, he was visited by one of those fairy-story happenings that brighten real life once or twice a century. The king of Bavaria, Ludwig 11., a madman with streaks of genius, became interested in -his music and sent for him. So obscure was Wagner that the messenger was six months in finding him, and had almost despaired when he discovered him in Stuttgart and informed him that he had been put upon the pension list with a yearly stipend of about SSOO. In Wagner’s words;“‘My creditors were quieted and I could go on with my work.’ ”