became bankrupt punctually every three months—­a fact which explains Meyerbeer’s readiness to help him in that quarter.  In desperation he seized the chance of earning a little money by writing the music for a vaudeville production, La Descente de la Courtille; but here again his luck was out:  a more practised hand took the job from him.  He composed what he considered simple songs adapted to the Parisian taste, and they were found too complicated and difficult to sing.  To earn mere bread he arranged the more popular numbers of popular operas for all sorts of instruments and combinations of instruments, and in one of his notes we find him bewailing the sad truth that even this work was coming to an end for a time.  However, he wrote on for Schlesinger’s Gazette Musicale; for Lewald’s Europa (German) and the Dresden Abendzeitung—­though the work for the second two did not commence till later on.  This toil perhaps brought him bread:  it did nothing more; Minna had to pawn her trifles of jewellery; there seemed not a ray of hope gleaming on the horizon.  The performance of his old Columbus overture did him a precious deal of good—­especially as at the second performance—­at a German concert arranged by Schlesinger—­the brass were so frightfully out of tune that people could not make out what it was the composer would be at.  It is needless to tell the ten times told miserable tale in further detail at this time of day; and I will now confine myself to the few facts that bear upon the fuller life that soon was to open before him.

IV

A new opera-house had been a-building in Dresden, a royal court theatre; and a chance in Paris being denied to Rienzi, Wagner, staggering along under the burden of his crushing woes, thought perhaps his grand spectacular work would be the very thing to suit the Dresdeners about the time of the opening.  True, there remained three acts to compose and orchestrate—­but what was that to a Richard Wagner!  Only one other composer has achieved such astounding feats.  Mozart, amidst multitudinous worries, sat down and wrote his three glorious symphonies “as easily as most men write a letter.”  Wagner was born to achieve the impossible:  he had already done it in getting to Paris at all; and now, as a sheer speculation, on the very off-chance of a Saxon court theatre accepting a work by a Saxon composer, harassed by creditors, despondent under repeated disappointments, drudging hours a day at hack-labour, he went to work and composed and instrumentated the last three acts of the most brilliant opera that had been written up to that date—­1841.  On February 15 of that year he began; on November 19 he ruled the last double-bar and wrote finis.  That done, he dispatched the complete score and a copy of the words to Dresden, with a letter to von Luettichau, the intendant.  Again the delays seemed interminable; his letters,