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The invertebrate flunkeys attached to every Court were jealous of his influence over the King, and did what they could to hinder the execution of his plans. But Wagner was not the man to be hindered, and if these backboneless crawling things made life at Munich so loathsome to him that he sought peace to complete his work at Triebschen, near Lucerne, nevertheless his plans were carried out.
The King himself could not stem the tide of false rumors, and besought the composer to leave Munich for a while, till public opinion calmed down. So Wagner returned to his favorite Switzerland and settled in Triebschen, near Lucerne, where he remained till he removed to Bayreuth in 1872.
He would have composed little more in such a city a city so misgoverned and misguided as Munich: his days would have been filled with bitterness, his nerves would have been quickly shattered by intrigues. He was now amply provided for; a villa the celebrated "Triebschen" was taken for him on the shores of Lucerne, and here he settled and remained for some years.
At Triebschen, near Lucerne, Wagner lived with the Von Bülow family, and began to know contentment. The relations of Wagner and Cosima rapidly grew intimate enough to torment even the idolatrous Von Bülow. Riemann says: "Domestic misunderstandings led, in 1869, to a separation, and Von Bülow left the city."
However, Wagner settled peacefully at Triebschen, and remained there until the Bayreuth idea took solid and visible shape. He completed the Mastersingers and Siegfried, and made progress with the Dusk of the Gods. When Minna died in 1868 he immediately married Cosima. The idea of what ultimately became Bayreuth took shape. Bayreuth was first thought of for a very prosaic reason.
A new reward for his long and stormy career was the realisation of the Bayreuth dream the building with hands of a material castle in Spain. Besides this opera-house of his own, to be consecrated to his own works, Wagner was given a home. He and his wife left the villa at Triebschen, on the lake at Lucerne, with much regret.
Night has come on, and Isolda falls on Tristan's body and dies, fulfilling the promise she had made that where he went she would follow. And so ends the greatest music-drama ever written, and the greatest likely to be written for centuries to come. We must pass on now to The Mastersingers, an old idea of Wagner's. The music was completed at Triebschen.
As I have mentioned, he went to Triebschen to complete the Ring for the sake of his conception of the hero Siegfried and he went there a jaded man. And there is an unmistakable quality in the music of his Third Act. In Tristan and the Mastersingers we have the perfectly mature Wagner; inspiration, invention and technical accomplishment are perfectly balanced.
The tragedy was not to be a monument to a mere dream of felicity or to his artistic despair, but a tribute to a consuming passion for Mathilde Wesendonck, wife of a benefactor who had given him an idyllic home at Triebschen, on the shore of Lake Lucerne. Mme. Wesendonck was the author of the two poems "Im Treibhaus" and "Traume," which, with three others from the same pen, Wagner set to music.
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