7 The 100 Most Influential Musicians of All Time 7Nürnberg (The Meistersingers of Nürnberg). By 1864, however,
he had to flee from Vienna to avoid imprisonment for debt.
He arrived in Stuttgart without a penny, a man of 51 with-
out a future, almost at the end of his tether.
Something like a miracle saved him. In 1864 Louis II
ascended the throne of Bavaria; he was a fanatical admirer
of Wagner’s art. Having read the poem of The Ring, Louis II
invited Wagner to complete the work in Munich and set him
up in a villa. During the next six years there were successful
Munich productions of all of Wagner’s representative works
to date, including Tristan (1865), Die Meistersinger (1868),
Das Rhinegold (1869), and Die Walküre (1870). During this
time Wagner constantly ran into debt, and he also attempted
to interfere in the government of the kingdom. In addition,
he became the lover of the great Wagner conductor Hans
von Bülow’s wife, Cosima, the daughter of Liszt. She bore
him three children—Isolde, Eva, and Siegfried—before her
divorce in 1870 and her marriage to Wagner that year. For all
these reasons, Wagner thought it advisable to leave Munich.
Last Years in Bayreuth
In 1869 Wagner had resumed work on The Ring, which he
now brought to its world-renouncing conclusion. It had
been agreed with the king that the tetralogy should be
first performed in its entirety at Munich, but Wagner
broke the agreement, convinced that a new type of the-
atre must be built for the purpose. Having discovered a
suitable site at the Bavarian town of Bayreuth, he toured
Germany, conducting concerts to raise funds to support
the plan, and in 1872 the foundation stone was laid. In 1874
Wagner moved into a house at Bayreuth that he called
Wahnfried (“Peace from Illusion”). The whole vast project
was eventually realized, in spite of enormous difficul-
ties. The Ring received its triumphant first complete