A violent cold threw me for a few days into a state of high fever; when I recovered from it, my birthday had come.  As I was sitting once more in the evening on my roof, I was surprised at hearing one of the songs of the Three Rhine Maidens, from the finale of Rheingold, which floated to my ears from the near distance across the gardens.  Frau Pollert, whose troubles with her husband had once stood in the way of a second performance in Magdeburg of my Liebesverbot (in itself a very difficult production), had again appeared last winter as a singer, and also as the mother of two daughters, in the theatrical firmament of Zurich.  As she still had a fine voice, and was full of goodwill towards me, I allowed her to practise the last act of Walkure for herself, and the Rhine Maidens scenes from the Rheingold with her two daughters, and frequently in the course of the winter we had managed to give short performances of this music for our friends.  On the evening of my birthday the song of my devoted lady friends surprised me in a very touching way, and I suddenly experienced a strange revulsion of feeling, which made me disinclined to continue the composition of the Nibelungen, and all the more anxious to take up Tristan again.  I determined to yield to this desire, which I had long nourished in secret, and to set to work at once on this new task, which I had wished to regard only as a short interruption to the great one.  However, in order to prove to myself that I was not being scared away from the older work by any feeling of aversion, I determined, at all events, to complete the composition of the second act of Siegfried, which had only just been begun.  This I did with a right good will, and gradually the music of Tristan dawned more and more clearly on my mind.

To some extent external motives, which seemed to me both attractive and advantageous to the execution of my task, acted as incentives to make me set to work on Tristan.  These motives became fully defined when Eduard Devrient came on a visit to me at the beginning of July and stayed with me for three days.  He told me of the good reception accorded to my despatch by the Grand Duchess of Baden, and I gathered that he had been commissioned to come to an understanding with me about some enterprise or other; I informed him that I had decided to interrupt my work on the Nibelungen by composing an opera, which was bound by its contents and requirements to put me once more into relation with the theatres, however inferior they might be.  I should do myself an injustice if I said that this external motive alone inspired the conception of Tristan, and made me determine to have it produced.  Nevertheless, I must confess that a perceptible change had come over the frame of mind in which, several years ago, I had contemplated the completion of the greater work.  At the same time I had come fresh from my writings upon art, in which I had attempted to explain the reasons for the decay of our public art, and especially of the theatre, by