Evening Republican, Volume 19, Number 23, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 27 January 1915 — MUSIC PAINFUL TO BISMARCK [ARTICLE]

MUSIC PAINFUL TO BISMARCK

•Melodies Cling to Me,” Said the Chancellor, "end I Find It Difficult to Release Myself.” Talking of the arts, Bismarck said: “Of music I am very fond, but now I have to abstain from hearing it, because tears come only too readily into my eyes. My heart is stronger than, my head. Indeed, what self-control I have has been bought by experience.” Many 1 instances occurred during our conversations which gave the truth to this assertion. The extreme mobility of his countenance and the shades of expression which passed over it told of a sensitive, i emotional temperament. “But I have a fire within me still which burns at times with fury.” Upon that I asked: “Are you in reality the Iron Chancellor?" "No,” he said, “not naturally; the iron I have created to use when, necessary.” And that I believed to be true.

I asked him if he knew Wagner personally. “-Yes,” he answered; “but it was quite impossible for me to care for him or to encourage his society. I had not .time to submit to his insatiable vanity. Before breakfast, at breakfast, before and after dinner, Wagner demanded sympathy and admiration. His egotism was wearisome and intolerable, and his demand for a listener was so incessant that I was obliged to avoid his company. I was too busy with my affairs to be able to give him all or even a portion of the demands he would have claimed upon my time. But I admire his music greatly, though I have been compelled to give up going to the opera, because the beautiful and touching melodies I cannot get out of my head; they cling to me, and I find it difficult to release myself from them, and now it tires me to be so much' moved.” —From “Conversations With Prince. Bismarck” by W. B. Richmond, the English Painter, in the North American Review.