Chris Walton, Tribschen for the Birds? Richard Wagner, Enmeshed in Litigation

After leaving Munich in late 1865, Wagner returned to Switzerland, his place of exile in the 1850s. He spent a few weeks in Geneva, then decided to rent a small villa at Tribschen, a peninsula just outside Lucerne. The owner was one Colonel Walter am Rhyn, a member of one of Lucerne’s old patrician families. King Ludwig II paid the rent, and Wagner remained there until his move to Bayreuth in 1872. The house did not conform to his requirements, however, so in 1867 he arranged for assorted renovation and refurbishment work to be done at his own cost, both inside the house and in the grounds. This work proceeded overall to his satisfaction, but a dispute arose with one contractor, an Ignaz Zeiger of Lucerne (sometimes written ‘Ignatz’) who was a ‘Drahtgeflechtfabrikant’ – a manufacturer of wire netting. Why Wagner needed or wanted wire netting cannot be determined with complete certainty, though it presumably had something to do with his little menagerie at Tribschen, which variously included horses, chickens, black sheep and two peacocks called Wotan and Fricka. Since the peacocks had their own special house (which still exists, next to the access road leading up to the villa) and since Zeiger was by his own admission a specialist in making chicken wire, the dispute was most likely about a chicken coop.