repetitions, although the house on the third night had been completely
sold out. He was to receive $50 for each performance. The result was
$150, or less than 50 cents a day, for a year's hard work and no end of
worry in connection with the rehearsals.

How many men are there in the annals of art who would have refused,
after all these disappointments and bitter lessons, to make _some_
concessions? Wagner was writing a gigantic work, the Nibelung Tetralogy,
which, he was convinced, would never yield a penny's profit during his
lifetime. Sometimes despair seized him. In one of his letters he
exclaims: "Why should I, poor devil, burden and torture myself with such
terrible tasks, if the present generation refuses to let me have even a
workshop?" Yet the only deviation he made from his plan was that when
he had reached the second act of the third of the Nibelung dramas, the
poetic "Siegfried," in June, 1857, he made up his mind to abandon the
Tetralogy for the time being, and compose an opera which might be
performed separately and once more bring him into contact with
the stage.

This opera was "Tristan and Isolde;" but instead of being a concession,
it turned out to be the most difficult and Wagnerian of all his
works,--an opera with much emotion but little action, no processions or
choruses such as "Lohengrin" still had, and, of course, no arias or
tunes whatever. "Tristan and Isolde" was completed in 1859, and Wagner
would have much preferred to have its performance in Paris commanded by
Napoleon in place of "Tannhaeuser." What the Jockey Club would have done
in that case is inconceivable, for, compared with "Tristan,"
"Tannhaeuser" is almost Meyerbeerian, if not Donizettian. No singers,
moreover, could have been found in Paris able to interpret this work,
with its new vocal style,--"speech-song," as the Germans call it. Even
Germany could do nothing, at first, with this opera. In Vienna, after
fifty-four rehearsals, it was abandoned, in 1863, as "impossible," and
that city did not produce it till after Wagner's death. Instead of
bringing him into immediate contact with the stage, it was not heard
_anywhere_ till seven years after its completion.

There was one more card for him to play. All his operas, so far, had
been tragedies. What if he were to write a comic opera? Would not that
be likely to get him access to the stage again, and help him
financially? He had the plan for a comic opera; indeed, he had sketched