Equally unsuccessful were his efforts, a few years later, to better himself financially by a series of concerts in Paris (1860).  They resulted in a large deficit.  Nor was he benefited by the performances of his “Tannhaeuser,” which were given at the grand opera in March, 1861, by order of Napoleon, at the request of the influential Princess Metternich.  He had refused to interpolate a vulgar ballet in the second act for the benefit of the members of the aristocratic Jockey Club, who dined late and insisted on having a ballet on entering the opera-house.  They took their revenge by creating such a disturbance every evening that after the third performance Wagner refused to allow any further 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.