He received some money, and more fame, and still more enemies as a result of his powerful literary tilts against Philistinism.  Then he took up the Nibelungen idea, planning to devote three years to the work; “little dreaming that it would keep him with interruptions for the next twenty-three years.”  For the accomplishment of this vast monument he asked only a humble place to work.  He wrote Uhlig: 

“I want a small house, with meadow and a little garden!  To work with zest and joy,—­but not for the present generation....  Rest! rest! rest!  Country! country! a cow, a goat, etc.  Then—­health—­happiness—­hope!  Else, everything lost.  I care no more.”

He found all in Zuerich, where he and his wife rowed about the lake, and accumulated friends.  He found special sympathy in the friendship of Frau Elise Wille, a novelist.  Perhaps she was more than a friend, for one of his letters to her is superscribed “Precious.”

But all the while he suffered much from erysipelas and dyspepsia, and was occasionally moved with violent despair to the edge of suicide, for he was exiled from his Fatherland, and he was an outlaw from the world of music, which he longed to enlarge and beautify.  He compared himself to Beethoven: 

“Strange that my fate should be like Beethoven’s! he could not hear his music because he was deaf....  I cannot hear mine because I am more than deaf, because I do not live in my time at all, because I move among you as one who is dead....  Oh, that I should not arise from my bed to-morrow, awake no more to this loathsome life!”

Financial troubles and the discouragement of his wife were still among the most faithful torments.  His letters to Liszt are abundant with alternations of artistic ecstasy and material misery.  It is worth recording that, “my wife has not scolded me once, although yesterday I had the spleen badly enough.”  To add to his misery, Minna became addicted to opium.  In 1858 he wrote Liszt: 

“My wife will return in a fortnight, after having finished her cure, which will have lasted three months.  My anxiety about her was terrible, and for two months I had to expect the news of her death from day to day.  Her health was ruined, especially by the immoderate use of opium, taken nominally as a remedy for sleeplessness.  Latterly the cure she uses has proved highly beneficial; the great weakness and want of appetite have disappeared, and the recovery of the chief functions (she used to perspire continually) and a certain abatement of her incessant excitement, have become noticeable.  The great enlargement of her heart will be bearable to her if only she keeps perfectly calm and avoids all excitement to her dying day.  A thing of this kind can never be got rid of entirely.  Thus I have to undertake new duties, over which I must try to forget my own sufferings.”