Wagner now settled for a time in Vienna, where Tristan und Isolde was accepted, but abandoned after fifty-seven rehearsals, through the incompetence of the tenor. Lohengrin was, however, produced on May 15, 1861, when Wagner heard it for the first time. His circumstances were now extremely straitened; it was the darkness before dawn. In 1863 he published the libretto of Der Ring des Nibelungen. King Ludwig of Bavaria was much struck with it, and in 2864 invited Wagner, who was then at Stutt gart, to come to Munich and finish his work there. Wagner accepted with rapture. The king gave him an annual grant of 1,200 gulden (L12o), considerably enlarging it before the end of the year, and placing a comfortable house in the outskirts of the city at his disposal. The master expressed his gratitude in a "Huldigungsmarsch." On June 10, 1865, at Munich, Tristan und Isolde was produced for the first time, with Herr and Frau Schnorr in the principal parts. Die Meistersinger von Nurnberg, first sketched in was completed in 1867 and first performed at Munich under the direction of Hans von Billow on June 21, 1868. Das Rheingold and Die Walkiire were performed, the one on Sept. 22, 1869, and the other on June 26, 187o. The scheme for building a new theatre at Munich having been abandoned, there was no opera house in Germany fit for so colossal a work. A project was there fore started for the erection of a suitable building at Bayreuth (q.v.). Wagner laid the first stone of this in 1872, and the edifice was completed, after almost insuperable difficulties, in 1876.
After this Wagner resided permanently at Bayreuth, in a house named Wahnfried, in the garden of which he built his tomb. His first wife, from whom he had parted since 2861, died in 1866; and in 187o he was united to Liszt's daughter Cosima, who had previously been the wife of von Billow. Meantime Der Ring des Nibelungen was rapidly approaching completion, and on Aug. 13, 1876, the introductory portion, Das Rheingold, was performed at Bayreuth for the first time as part of the great whole, followed on the 14th by Die IV alkfire, on the 16th by Siegfried and on the 17th by Gotterddmmerung.
Wagner's next and last work was Parsifal, based upon the legend of the Holy Grail, as set forth, not in the legend of the Morte d' Arthur, but in the versions of Chrestien de Troyes and Wolfram von Eschenbach and other less-known works. The libretto was complete before his visit to London in 1877. The music was begun in the following year, and completed at Palermo on Jan. 13, 1882. The first sixteen performances took place at Bayreuth, in July and August 1882, under Wagner's own directing, and fully realized all •expectations.
Unhappily the exertion of directing so many consecutive per formances seems to have been too much for the veteran master's strength, for towards the close of 1882 his health began to decline rapidly. He spent the autumn at Venice, and was well enough on Christmas Eve to conduct his early symphony (composed in 1833) at a private performance given at the Liceo Marcello. But
late in the afternoon of Feb. 13, 1883, his friends were shocked by his sudden death from heart-failure.
Wagner was buried at Wahnfried in the tomb he had himself prepared, on Feb. 18; and a few days afterwards King Ludwig rode to Bayreuth alone, and at dead of night, to pay his last tribute to the master of his world of dreams.
In the articles on Music and OPERA, Wagner's task in music drama is described, and it remains here to discuss his progress in the operas themselves. This progress has perhaps no parallel in any art, and certainly none in music, for even Beethoven's progress was purely an increase in range and power. Wagner's earlier works have too long been treated as if they represented the pure and healthy childhood of his later ideal ; as if Lohengrin stood to Parsifal as Haydn, Mozart and early Beethoven stand to Beetho ven's last quartets. But Wagner never thus represented the child hood of an ideal, though he attained the manhood of the most comprehensive ideal yet known in art. To change the metaphor— the ideal was always in sight, and Wagner never swerved from his path towards it; but that path began in a blaze of garish false lights, and it had become very tortuous before the light of day prevailed. Beethoven was trained in the greatest and most ad vanced musical tradition of his time. In spite of all his impa tience, his progress was no struggle from out of a squalid environ ment ; on the contrary, one of his latest discoveries was the greatness of his master Haydn. Now Wagner's excellent teacher Weinlig did certainly, as Wagner himself testifies, teach him more of good music than Beethoven, Haydn and Mozart could have seen in their youth; for he showed him Beethoven. But this would not help Wagner to feel that contemporary music was really a great art ; indeed it could only show him that he was growing up in a pseudo-classical time, in which the approval of persons of "good taste" was seldom directed to things of vital promise. Again, he began with far greater facility in literature than in music, if only because a play can be copied ten times faster than a full score. Wagner was always an omnivorous reader, and books were then, as now, both cheaper than music and easier to read. Moreover, the higher problems of rhythmic movement in the classical sonata forms are far beyond the scope of academic teaching, which is compelled to be contented with a practical plausibility of musical design; and the instrumental music which was considered the highest style of art in 183o was as far beyond Wagner's early command of such plausibility as it was obviously already becoming a mere academic game. Lastly, the rules of that game were useless on the stage, and Wagner soon found in Meyerbeer a master of grand opera who was dazzling the world by means which merely disgusted the more serious academic musicians of the day.