From a photograph of a painting by R. Steche.
]
Thus we find him impelled by the demands as well as the artistic
possibilities of a fruitful story to the construction of his great
tetralogy, consisting of the dramas eventually named “Das Rheingold”
(“The Rhinegold”), “Die Walküre” (“The Valkyrie”), “Siegfried,” and “Die
Götterdämmerung” (“The Dusk of the Gods”). A further incentive to the
creation of this four-part work was his belief that the true lyric play
should be modelled after the Greek drama, in whose literature he found
the trilogy of Æschylus—the “Agamemnon,” “Chœphoræ,” and “Eumenides” and
“The Seven against Thebes,” believed to have been the final play of a
tetralogy. He began to labor at this gigantic undertaking without any
definite hope of its performance; indeed, with doubts as to his living
to complete it. So great, however, was his enthusiasm that, in spite of
the formidable artistic problems which he had to solve and the novelty
and complexity of his own musico-dramatic system, now to be developed
for the first time to its logical outcome, he had the poem completed and
printed for private circulation early in 1853.[3]
“During the summer of 1853 he visited a place near Saint Maurice, and
from there he undertook a trip into the North of Italy.... It was during
a sleepless night at Spezzia that the first ideas of the ‘Rheingold’
music passed through his mind. He brought his journey to an end, and
hastened to regain his tranquil home at Zurich, that he might not
commence such a work on Italian soil.”[4] The score of “Das Rheingold”
was completed in May, 1854. The next month he began “Die Walküre” and
finished all save the instrumentation in the winter of 1854–55. The
score was done in 1856, and in 1857 most of the first two acts of
“Siegfried” were composed and orchestrated. His labors had been
interrupted by the production of “Tannhäuser” at Zurich in 1855, by a
visit from his best of friends, Liszt, and by a journey to London to
conduct the concerts of the Philharmonic Society from March to June,
1855. He felt that he must accept this engagement or, as he said in a
letter to Praeger, “renounce the public and all relations with it once
and for all.”[5]
[Illustration: