Part II

.) was completed in 1869, and in the following year Wagner married Cosima, the daughter of Liszt, and formerly the wife of Von Bülow. His first wife, from whom he had been separated in 1861, died at Dresden in 1866.

A theatre built somewhere off the main lines of traffic, and specially constructed for the performance of Wagner's later works, must have seemed the most impracticable and visionary of proposals in 1870; and yet, chiefly through the unwearying exertions of Carl Tausig (and, after his death, of the various Wagner societies), the foundation-stone of the Baireuth Theatre was laid in 1872, and in 1876, two years after the completion of the "Götterdämmerung" ("Nibelungen Ring,"