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The domestic career of Richard Wagner
has formed the subject for endless
discussions. His birth, his early studies,
his university career, and
his start as a professional musician, all took place in Leipsic. There,
too, he met the famous opera singer, Wilhelmine Schroeder-Devrient,
whose gifts made such an impression on the young composer. It was the
excellence of her acting, as well as her singing, that gave the embryo
reformer his first ideas of the intimate union of drama and music that
is one phase of his later operatic greatness. Many of his leading
rôles
were written for her, and as late as 1872 he stated that whenever he
conceived a new character he imagined her in the part.
His work as leader took him first to
Magdeburg. The failure of his early
opera, "Das Liebesverbot," put an end to this enterprise, and soon
afterward he appeared as concert leader in Koenigsberg. There he met
and
married his first wife, Wilhelmina (or Minna) Planer. Their natures
were
different in many respects. While he displayed many of the vagaries of
genius, she was patient and practical, and, if not wholly understanding
the highest side of his nature, she gave up her own career to help him
through his days of poverty and struggle.
The first venture of the wedded pair was
at Riga, where Wagner was
engaged for a term to conduct in a new theatre. After this, they took
ship for Paris, and the stormy passage
gave Wagner many a suggestion
for his "Flying Dutchman." It was in the French capital that Minna's
domestic qualities were given their most severe trial, for the composer
found little or no chance to produce his own works, and was forced to
gain a precarious living by the commonest musical drudgery. Probably
her
constant care and economy were all that turned the scale in favour of
success. At length the Dresden authorities became interested in some of
the earlier operas, and Wagner was liberated from his dependent
position.
The stay in Dresden being cut short by
the political troubles of 1848
and 1849, Wagner found a home in Zurich, where his wife soon joined
him.
There he wrote or sketched the grand works that came to full fruition
in
his later life. After years of exile, he came back to Germany, where
his
pursuit of fortune was still in vain, and might have ended in suicide
but for the sudden patronage of his royal admirer, the mad King Ludwig
of Bavaria. It was at this time that the differences in character began
to cause domestic infelicity in the Wagnerian household. Finally the
pair separated, and, although he did not leave Minna in want, yet she
was compelled to pass the last few years of her life in seclusion and
loneliness, while he basked in the favour
of royalty, and found the
high position that had so long been denied him. It is usually claimed
by
Wagner's most rabid partisans that she was unable to hold her place in
the new surroundings, and that his genius needed a helpmate more in
sympathy with his high ideals. Admitting the truth of these assertions,
the fair-minded critic must accept them as an explanation, at least, of
his conjugal ingratitude, but Minna's faithful performance of duty in
the early days will not allow them to stand as a valid excuse.
Wagner's second marriage with Cosima,
daughter of Liszt and divorced
wife of Von Bülow, resulted happily. The devotion of the new
helpmate to
the Wagnerian cause has survived the master's death by many years, and
is still witnessed by the musical world. The domestic bliss of their
married life is well shown in the beautiful Siegfried Idyll, which
Wagner composed as a surprise for his wife on their son's birthday.
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