On the other hand, I occasionally had music at home.  Neat and precious copies of Klindworth’s pianoforte score of Rheingold, as well as of some acts of the Walkure, lay ready to hand, and Baumgartner was the first who was set down to see what he could make of the atrociously difficult arrangement.  Later on we found that Theodor Kirchner, a musician who had settled at Winterthur and frequently visited Zurich, was better able to play certain bits of the pianoforte score.  The wife of Heim, the head of the Glee Society, with whom we were both on friendly terms, was pressed into the service to sing the parts for female voices when I attempted to play some of the vocal parts.  She had a really fine voice and a warm tone, and had been the only soloist at the big performances in 1853; only she was thoroughly unmusical, and I had hard work to make her keep in tune, and it was even more difficult to get the time right.  Still, we achieved something, and my friends had an occasional foretaste of my Nibelungen music.

But I had to exercise great moderation here too, as every excitement threatened to bring on a return of erysipelas.  A little party of us were at Karl Ritter’s one evening, when I hit upon the idea of reading aloud Hoffmann’s Der Goldene Topf.  I did not notice that the room was getting gradually cooler, but before I had finished my reading I found myself, to every one’s horror, with a swollen, red nose, and had to trail laboriously home to tend the malady, which exhausted me terribly every time.  During these periods of suffering I became more and more absorbed in developing the libretto of Tristan, whereas my intervals of convalescence were devoted to the score of the Walkure, at which I toiled diligently but laboriously, completing the fair copy in March of that year (1856).  But my illness and the strain of work had reduced me to a state of unusual irritability, and I can remember how extremely bad-tempered I was when our friends the Wesendoncks came in that evening to pay a sort of congratulatory visit on the completion of my score.  I expressed my opinion of this way of sympathising with my work with such extraordinary bitterness that the poor insulted visitors departed abruptly in great consternation, and it took many explanations, which I had great difficulty in making, to atone for the insult as the days went on.  My wife came out splendidly on this occasion in her efforts to smooth things over.  A special tie between her and our friends had been formed by the introduction of a very friendly little dog into our house, which had been obtained by the Wesendoncks as a successor to my good old Peps.  He proved such a good and ingratiating animal that he soon gained my wife’s tender affection, while I, too, always felt very kindly towards him.  This time I left the choice of a name to my wife, however, and she invented, apparently as a pendant to Peps, the name Fips, which I was quite willing for him to have.  But he was always more my wife’s friend, as, despite my great sense of justice, which made me recognise the excellence of these animals, I never was able to become so attached to them as to Peps and Papo.