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have to be supplanted? As for Ludwig himself, Wagner was equally uncertain. Beautiful? Yes, but beauty fades. Intelligent? Undoubtedly, but he knew nothing of music. Full of feeling? He certainly seemed to understand the libretti very well. The whole exciting business, though no doubt it would soon grow tiresome, was certainly marvellous. Adolescence was a dangerous country, but if it produced another opera, after all, why not? He would reap the King’s favour like a profitable crop. He smiled and blew out the candle. All was well. He had already been granted an allowance from the Treasury. It would pay his debts. Later he could ask for more.
    In some ways Wagner was an enviable man: there wasn’t an ounce of pity or compassion in his soul. But hesaw certain difficulties all the same. Rarely is greatness recognized, except by accident, or for the wrong reasons, for greatness is unique, and we can recognize only what we have already seen.
    The King was a beautiful boy. He might have been Parsifal. But clearly he wanted to live always on the heights, into which he as clearly planned to buy his way. But genius, having no market value, cannot be sold or bought. Nor could Wagner sit all day long at Starnberg, writing incessantly and visited only by a disembodied idealist. Wagner was a man, as well as a genius. He could already tell that as a man he had desires for which the young king would have neither approval nor understanding. He would have to be careful. For the king also had desires, and they were probably ambiguous. Also those eyes saw too much. Very well, Wagner would go to Berg on the Starnbergersee for a while, if that would please the King, but he would not live there without company of his own choosing. There were some things which the King need never know.

IV
    S o it was not so difficult to get Wagner to Berg, after all.
    Royal families have always tucked away somewhere a small modest house where they go to earth to become human, only to discover they have forgotten how. Since everyone becomes an imitation of himself in time, this lends to the behaviour of royalty a curious facelessness, for from earliest childhood they have had no one to imitate but the idea of royalty itself, which has no face.
    Of such somewhat pathetic domestic retreats, Berg had always been Ludwig’s favourite, even as a child. It was a toy. He always felt better there, and he felt better now. It was May of 1864, and he was ecstatically happy. Wagner was established across the lake. Ludwig was alone, but to think of Wagner was even more satisfactory than to be with him, and besides, the Master must work, and as long as he knew where the ideal companion was and what he was doing, Ludwig did not care whether he was present or not. He had him in imagination, everywhere.
    For instance he and Wagner might have taken a walk into the crags, and communed with the moon in the hovering insect stillness of the night, under the shade of some dead tree. Or they might have climbed the Watzmann together, that mountain which seemed the geniusof the lake. Such things were better to imagine than to cause to be. It was a great pleasure to be able to walk alone in the cool night, thinking of someone else, and he savoured the experience accordingly. The night was what he would have had people be, impersonal yet tender.
    The moonlight glittered supernaturally on the lake, so that through the trees the water became something more than water. The woods surged towards him, like bounding dogs, yet through the slender tree trunks the pulsating blue-white light of the lake offered him salvation. Salvation was what he wanted. He approached the shore as Parsifal approached Monsalvasch, the magic, unattainable castle of the grail. The light within the edges of the nightwood touched him profoundly. Wagner had given him a soul. If it was transformation he desired, it could be found here, where the branches interwove and grew in every direction, like the leitmotifs of the