the lawyer, to give evidence in my favour, asking nothing more of him than that he should forward to me a copy of the correspondence referring to the rights I had reserved, which had become valid in the Lucerne transaction.  To all the letters addressed to him on this subject, however, he obstinately refused an answer, and I learned later on from a Viennese lawyer that I must give up hoping to get this kind of evidence, as I had no legal means in my possession to force the advocate to give it, if he were not so inclined.

While, owing to this, I had little opportunity of improving my prospects for the future, I had at least the satisfaction of seeing the score of Tannhauser engraved at last.  As the stock of my earlier autograph copies had come to an end, chiefly through the wasteful management of Meser, I had already persuaded Hartel when I was in Venice to have the score engraved.  Meser’s successor had acquired the complete rights of this work, and therefore regarded it as a point of honour not to give up the score to another publisher; consequently he took over the task of producing it at his own cost.  Unluckily fate demanded that just a year later I had to revise and reconstruct the first two scenes completely.  To this day it is a subject of regret to me not to have been able to introduce this fresh piece of work into the engraved score.

The Hartels, never faltering in their assumption that Tristan might provide good food for the theatre, set their men busily to work upon engraving the score of the second act, while I was at work on the third.  The process of registering corrections, while I was in the throes of composing the third act—­one long ecstasy--wielded over me a strange, almost uncanny influence; for in the first scenes of this act it was made clear to me that in this opera (which had been most unwarrantably assumed to be an easy one to produce), I had embodied the most daring and most exotic conception in all my writings.  While I was at work on the great scene of Tristan, found myself often asking whether I was not mad to want to give such work to a publisher to print for the theatre.  And yet I could not have parted with a single accent in that tale of pain, although the whole thing tortured me to the last degree.

I tried to overcome my gastric troubles by using (among other things) Kissingen water in moderate doses.  As I was fatigued and made incapable of work by the early walks I had to take during this treatment, it occurred to me to take a short ride instead.  For this purpose the hotel manager lent me a horse, aged twenty-five, named Lise.  On this animal I rode every morning as long as it would carry me.  It never conveyed me very far, but turned back regularly at certain spots without taking the slightest notice of my directions.