John Deathridge, Public and Private Life: Scenes and Episodes from the Composition of ‘Tristan und Isolde’

It has long been known, but is seldom properly acknowledged, that Wagner’s original intention was to turn Tristan und Isolde into an easily performable work that all opera houses would be eager to produce. As always, Wagner urgently needed money. In 1856 when his contract negotiations with the firm of Breitkopf & Härtel to publish Der Ring des Nibelungen were about to fall through, he wrote to Liszt that if this were to happen (as indeed it did) he ‘would have no alternative but to give up the Nibelungen and instead to start planning a simple work – like Tristan – that would give me the advantage of getting opera houses to produce it quickly and thereby earning myself some money’.