Besides this, I was interested at that time in the expected crisis of the American money market in the month of November, the consequences of which, during a few fatal weeks, threatened to endanger the whole of my friend Wesendonck’s fortune.  I remember that the impending catastrophe was borne with great dignity by those who were likely to be its victims; still the possibility of having to sell their house, their grounds, and their horses cast an unavoidable gloom over our evening meetings; and, after a while, Wesendonck went away to make arrangements with various foreign bankers.

During that time I spent the mornings in my house composing Tristan, and every evening we used to read Calderon, which made a deep and permanent impression upon me, for I had become fairly familiar with Spanish dramatic literature, thanks to Schack.  At last the dreaded American crisis happily blew over, and it was soon apparent that Wesendonck’s fortune had considerably increased.  Again, during the winter evenings, I read Tristan aloud to a wider circle of friends.  Gottfried Keller was pleased with the compact form of the whole, which really contained only three full scenes.  Semper, however, was very angry about it:  he objected that I took everything too seriously, and said that the charm in the artistic construction of such material consisted in the fact that the tragic element was broken up in such a way that one could extract enjoyment even from its most affecting parts.  That was just what pleased him in Mozart’s Don Juan, one met the tragic types there, as if at a masquerade, where even the domino was preferable to the plain character.  I admitted that I should get on much more comfortably if I took life more seriously and art more lightly, but for the present I intended to let the opposite relations prevail.

As a matter of fact people shook their heads.  After I had sketched the first act of the composition, and had developed the character of my musical production more precisely.  I thought with a peculiar smile of my first idea of writing this work as a sort of Italian opera, and I became less anxious at the absence of news from Brazil.  On the other hand, my attention was particularly drawn at the end of this year to what was going on in Paris in regard to my operas.  A young author from that city wrote asking me to entrust him with the translation of my Tannhauser, as the manager of the Theatre Lyrique, M. Carvalho, was taking steps to produce that opera in Paris.  I was alarmed at this, as I was afraid that the copyright of my works had not been secured in France, and that they might dispose of them there at their own sweet will.  To this I most strongly objected.  I was well aware how this undertaking would be carried out, from an account I had read a short time before of the performance of Weber’s Euryanthe at that very Theatre Lyrique, and of the objectionable elaborations or rather mutilations which had been effected for the purposes of production.