My eyes were
blinded, I breathed with difficulty, and my limbs soon became cramped;
for we sat on wooden benches, crushed in a narrow space between solid
walls of human beings. But with the first note of the music all was
forgotten, and one fell into a state of painful yet delicious torpor.
Perhaps one's very discomfort made the pleasure keener. Those who know
the intoxication of climbing a mountain know also how closely it is
associated with the discomforts of the climb--with fatigue and the
blinding light of the sun, with out-of-breathness, and all the other
sensations that rouse and stimulate life and make the body tingle, so
that the remembrance of it all is carved indelibly on the mind. The
comfort of a playhouse adds nothing to the illusion of a play; and it
may even be due to the entire inconvenience of the old concert-rooms
that I owe my vivid recollection of my first meeting with Wagner's work.
How mysterious it was, and what a strange agitation it filled me with!
There were new effects of orchestration, new timbres, new rhythms, and
new subjects; it held the wild poetry of the far-away Middle Ages and
old legends, it throbbed with the fever of our hidden sorrows and
desires.
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