Soon my things arrived from Venice.  The Erard had been obliged to cross the Alps again when the snow was on the ground.  When it was set up in my spacious drawing-room, I said to myself that all this trouble and expense had been incurred to enable me at last to complete the third act of Tristan und Isolde.  There were times when this seemed to me to be an extravagant ambition; for the difficulties in the way of finishing my work seemed to make it impossible.  I compared myself to Leto who, in order to find a place in which to give birth to Apollo and Artemis, was hunted about the world and could find no resting-place until Poseidon, taking compassion on her, caused the island of Delos to rise from the sea.

I wished to regard Lucerne as this Delos.  But the terrible influence of the weather, which was intensely cold and continuously wet, weighed upon my spirits in a most unfriendly fashion until the end of May.  As such great sacrifice had been made to find this new place of refuge, I thought every day had been uselessly frittered away which had not contributed something to my work of composing.  For the greater part of my third act I was occupied with a subject sad beyond words; it came to such a pass that it is only with a shudder that I can recall the first few months of this emigration to Lucerne.

A few days after my arrival I had already visited the Wesendoncks in Zurich.  Our meeting was melancholy, but in no way embarrassed.  I spent some days in my friends’ house, where I saw my old Zurich acquaintances again, and felt as though I were passing from one dream to another.  In fact, everything assumed an air of unsubstantiality for me.  Several times in the course of my stay in Lucerne I repeated this visit, which was twice returned to me, once on the occasion of my birthday.

Besides the work on which I was now somewhat gloriously engaged, I was also heavy with cares about keeping myself and my wife alive.  Of my own accord and out of necessary respect for the circumstances in which my friends the Ritters were placed, I had already in Venice felt myself for the future obliged to decline their voluntary support.  I was beginning to exhaust the little that I could contrive to extract with difficulty from those of my operas which up to this period it had been possible to produce.  It was settled that I should take up the Nibelungen work when Tristan was finished, and I thought it my duty to find out some way of making my future existence easier.  This Nibelungen work spurred me to the attempt.  The Grand Duke of Weimar still kept up his interest in it, to judge from the communications I had received from him during the previous year.  I therefore wrote to Liszt and repeated my request that he would make a serious proposal to the Grand Duke to buy the copyright of the work and arrange for its publication, with the right of disposing of it to a publisher on his own terms.  I enclosed my former negotiations with Hartel, which had been broken off, and which were now intended to serve as a fair basis for what may be called the business arrangement that Liszt was to enter into with the Grand Duke.  Liszt soon gave me an embarrassed hint that his Royal Highness was not really keen on it.  This was quite enough for me.