ongs 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. Ag