During his exile, which was passed mostly in Zurich, he had Karl Ritter and Hans von Buelow for pupils, and it was there that he did all of his most wonderful work. There he composed the "Nibelung Ring." He wrote the last of it first, and the first of it ("Das Rheingold") last. This was because his central idea, as it developed, seemed to need explanation, and successive operas upon the same dramatic and mythological theme became necessary. Wagner's mythology is not the mythology of the Eddas. It is distinctly his own, he having adapted a great and rugged folklore to his dramatic purposes, regardless of its original construction. In the Ring, the Goddess Fricka is a disagreeable goddess of domesticity, and the story is told of a first reading of the opera series, which involved an anecdote of Fricka and his hostess: He went to the house of a friend, Wille, to read the poem after it was finished, and Madame Wille happened to be called from the room, while he was reading, to look after her little sick child. When she returned, Wagner had been so annoyed by the interruption that he thereafter named Madame Wille, Fricka. During a sleepless night in Italy he formed the plan for the music of "Das Rheingold," but not wishing to write on Italian soil, he got up and hastened to Zurich. He would not come to America to give a series of concerts because he "was not disposed to go about as a concert-pedlar, even for a fabulous sum." The irony of all the world is epitomized in a single incident that occurred to Wagner in London. He was accused of a grave fault because he conducted Beethoven's symphonies "from memory." Therefore he announced he would thereafter conduct them from the score. He reappeared with the score very much in evidence upon his rack, and won British approval completely. Then he announced that he had conducted from "Il Barbiere de Siviglia" with the Barber's score upside down! He wrote to his friend Roekel: "If anything could increase my scorn of the world, it would be my expedition to London." Wagner was fiery and excessive in all his feelings and doings. He hurt his friends without malice, and made them happy for love of doing so. His home was broken up by his own unruly disposition; and when his good, commonplace wife left him, it was said that he neglected to take care of her, but this was not true. She, herself, denied it before she died. His second marriage was a happy one--to the daughter of his friend Liszt. When his little son was born, he named him Siegfried, after his favourite hero, and at the time of the christening he had a magnificent little orchestra hidden away, conducted by Hans Richter, which played the old German cradle-song, now woven into the third act of "Siegfried."