His third artistic period began in 1847, his sojourn at Weimar. It was the most attractive and fruitful of all. From 1848 to 1861 the musical centre of Germany was this little town immortalised by Goethe. There the world flocked to hear the first performance of Lohengrin, and other Wagner operas. A circle consisting of Raff, Von Bülow, Tausig, Cornelius, Joseph Joachim, Schumann, Robert Franz, Litolff, Dionys Pruckner, William Mason, Lassen, with Berlioz and Rubinstein and Brahms (in 1854) and Remenyi as occasional visitors, to mention a tithe of famous names, surrounded Liszt. His elective affinity--in Goethe's phrase--was the Princess Sayn-Wittgenstein, who with her child had deserted the usual brutal and indifferent husband--in fashionable romances. Her influence upon Liszt's character has been disputed, but unwarrantably. She occasionally forced him to do the wrong thing, as in the case of the ending of the Dante symphony; _vide_, the new Wagner Autobiography. Together they wrote his chief literary works, the study of Chopin--the princess supplying the feverish local colour, and the book on Hungarian gipsy music, which contains a veiled attack on the Jews, for which Liszt was blamed. The Sayn-Wittgenstein was an intense, narrow nature--she has been called a "slightly vulgar aristocrat," and one of her peculiarities was seeing in almost every one of artistic or intellectual prominence Hebraic traits or lineaments. Years before the Geyer and the Leipsic _Judengasse_ story came out she unhesitatingly pronounced Richard Wagner of Semitic origin; she also had her doubts about Berlioz and others. The Lisztian theory of gipsy music consists, as Dannreuther says, in the merit of a laboured attempt to prove the existence of something like a gipsy epic in terms of music, the fact being that Hungarian gipsies merely play Hungarian popular tunes in a fantastic and exciting manner, but have no music that can properly be called their own. Liszt was a facile, picturesque writer and did more with his pen for Wagner than Wagner's own turbid writings. But a great writer he was not--many-sided as he was. It was unkind, however, on the part of Wagner to say to a friend that Cosima had more brains than her father. If she has, Bayreuth since her husband's death hasn't proved it. Wagner, when he uttered this, was probably in the ferment of a new passion, having quite recovered from his supposedly eternal love for Mathilde Wesendonck.