trying to construe them into a metaphysical exposition:  there is quite enough to digest without that.  Even the longing for death which Tristan expresses as the only cure for the woes of an impossible life arises from the drama; Tristan no more preaches Schopenhauer than he preaches Buddhism when he exclaims “Nun banne das Bangen, holder Tod.”  Wagner chose the subject of Tristan not to expound anything, but for the prosaic reason that he wanted to raise money and the subject seemed the most promising for the purpose.  This is put beyond a doubt by a letter to Liszt dated July 2, 1858.  Everything seemed to work against him; Rienzi proved a failure when it was put on at Weimar, and nothing could be hoped for in that quarter; the pecuniary situation was desperate.  He had received a commission from the Emperor Pedro I of Brazil for an opera, and thought Tristan a likely theme.  As early as December of 1854 he had written to Liszt mentioning it as planned in his head; and in this letter of ’58 he says, “...  I saw no other way open to me but to negotiate with Haertel, and I chose for this subject Tristan, then scarcely begun, because I had nothing else.  They offered to pay me half the honorarium (two hundred louis d’or)—­that is, one hundred louis d’or—­on receipt of the score of the first act, and I made all the haste I could to complete it.  That is why this poor work was hurried on in such a business-like manner.”  It seems rather comical now that the world’s most magnificent, and certainly most profound, musical tragedy should have been commenced to be sung by an Italian company in such an out-of-the-way spot as Rio de Janeiro and in the hope of pleasing semi-barbarian ears; and it is rather a pity it never found its way there.  One thing is certain:  the press criticisms could not have been more foolish than those that greeted the opera when it was produced in Munich.

Exactly where Wagner got the idea from I cannot say.  Of course, in one shape or another the legend exists in every European literature; and probably he had been familiar with it for years.  Praeger’s story of Wagner getting hold of Gottfried von Strassburg’s interminable version in the summer of 1855 and conceiving the thing in a flash might very well be true; only, unluckily for Praeger, the letter to Liszt in the previous year shows it to be in another sense a story.  By September 1857 the poem was done, and Wagner at once set to work on the music.  He had sketched the first act by the end of the same year, and in the early part of ’59 the whole opera was complete.  We have just seen one reason for pressing forward “this poor work ... in such a business-like manner”; but even without the pecuniary inducement I fancy he would have composed quickly. Tristan is one of those works, like Carlyle’s French Revolution, which one feels had either to be written rapidly or not at all.  The music seems to have welled forth in a red-hot torrent, and his pen could