“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: BAYREUTH HILL AND THE THEATRE OF THE FESTIVALS. From a photograph. ] A more important interruption, however, was to come. In 1851, Arthur Schopenhauer’s “Parerga und Paralipomena” was published, and created a sensation which called attention to his earlier philosophical work, “The World as Will and Representation” (1818), hitherto unnoticed in the glare of Hegel’s and Schelling’s success. Wagner plunged into Schopenhauer’s pessimistic philosophy with ardor. At the same time he was reading Godfrey von Strassburg’s “Tristan,” and conceived the idea of embodying Schopenhauer’s pessimism in a story of unhappy passion. He read Strassburg’s poem to Praeger, who was visiting him, and spoke of its adaptability to operatic treatment. The next morning at breakfast, in a fit of abstraction, he conceived some of the love music. Now the desire seized him to write a work which could be completed and produced. Moreover he needed money. And to end all, a mysterious agent appeared with a commission for an opera from the Emperor of Brazil. Wagner hesitated about the commission, but he began “Tristan and Isolde.” He finished the poem early in 1857, the music of the first act in the winter, the second act in Venice, March 2, 1859, and the third act in Lyons, August, 1859. [Illustration: THE GRAND CANAL, VENICE, SHOWING RESIDENCE OF RICHARD WAGNER. From a photograph. ]