"However extravagant this plan may be, it is, nevertheless, the only one to which I can devote my life and labours. If I live to see it accomplished, I have lived gloriously; if not, I die for something grand. Only this can still give me any pleasure."
His creditors from Dresden were everlastingly at his heels; even in Dresden, with a substantial and regular salary, he could not keep out of debt--though it must be remembered that older debts pursued him from the Riga days, and even earlier. By April of 1856 the _Valkyrie_ was scored and _Siegfried_ begun; next year he finished the first act of the latter. His life, apparently, went on pretty much as before; but the financial situation was rapidly becoming intolerable--even to him. The famous invitation to write an opera for Rio de Janeiro arrived, and he promptly set to work on the subject he had mentioned in a letter to Liszt a few years before, _Tristan and Isolda_. His health grew worse than ever, and somehow he found the means to spend the winter in Venice. Then he settled for a while in Lucerne, and completed _Tristan_.
Afterwards he removed to Paris, where in 1860 he gave some concerts; in the same year the score of _Tristan_ was issued; next year came the _Tannhäuser_ fiasco at the opera, and later he heard _Lohengrin_, in Vienna, for the first time; next he stayed for a while at Biebrich, and finally settled in Vienna.
This is all the biography of ten of the fullest years of his life that we need trouble about at present. His everyday existence is only diversified and variegated by little anecdotes not worth repetition. He was everywhere, of course, the musical lion. And, speaking of animals, he always had a few: it had been a real grief to him some years before when his parrot died when it had just mastered a passage of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony.
When he finished _Tristan_ in August of 1859, his prospects were, so to speak, as bright as before. It may here be mentioned, by way of showing how bright that was, that when, four years later, an attempt was made to give _Tristan_ at Vienna, the work was abandoned after at least fifty rehearsals.
His letters, first to his faithful servitor Uhlig, who died in 1853 at the age of thirty-one, and then to Fischer, are full of requests to get scores copied, to send them here, there and everywhere, and to collect honorariums. But, as I have said, for years he had hungry creditors snapping at his heels, and they devoured most of the fruits of his early genius. It is a fact to be faced that Wagner never in all his life earned his livelihood. He earned more than average men require to live comfortably upon; but he was unceasingly extravagant, and denied himself nothing. He had been hungry in his early Paris days; for the remainder of his life he bent himself to the task of making up for that spell of famine. The precariousness of his income, the insecurity of his position, fostered the habit of self-indulgence; by nature the reverse of miserly, if he had money to-day he spent it, reflecting that he might have none to-morrow. His debts, moreover, were not entirely for what we may call personal extravagances. So confident and sanguine was he that he had the full scores of his operas published at his own expense; and the charges had to be met out of what the operas brought him. And so when he had finished _Tristan_ in 1859 the outlook was of the blackest.