Nothing is difficult when you put your heart in it.
The obstacles to be overcome in setting words to sounds were like a game of chess—a pleasing diversion. In a month he knew as much of the science of music as many men did who had grubbed at the work a lifetime. "The finances! Get your principles right and then 'tis a mere matter of detail, requiring only concentration—I will arrange it," said Napoleon.
Wagner focused on music, yet here seems a good place to say that he never learned either to play the piano or to sing. He had to trust the "details" to others. Yet at twenty he led an orchestra. Soon after he became conductor of the opera at Magdeburg.
In some months more he drifted to Konigsberg, and there acted as conductor at the Royal Theater. In the company of this theater was a young woman by the name of Wilhelmina Planer. Wagner got acquainted with her across the footlights. She was young, comely and all that—they became engaged. Shortly afterwards, one fine moonlight night, in response to her merry challenge, they rang up the "Dom" and were married. They got better acquainted afterward.
t is a fact that Wagner's imprudent marriage at the age of twenty-three has been much regretted and oft lamented. "What," say the Impressionable Ones, "Oh, what could he not have accomplished with a proper mate!"
It is very true that Minna Planer had no comprehension of the genius of her husband; that her two feet were always flatly planted on earth, and her head never reached the clouds; and true it is that she was a weary weight to him for the twenty-five years they lived together. Still men grow strong by carrying burdens; and we must remember that Wagner was what he was on account of what he endured and suffered.
Wagner expressed himself in his art, and all great art is simply the honest, spontaneous, individual expression of soul-emotion. Had Wagner's emotions been different he would have produced a totally different sort of art. That is to say, if Wagner in his youth had loved and wedded a woman who was capable of giving his soul peace, we would have had no Wagner; we would have had some one else, and therefore a totally different expression, or no expression at all. Probably the man would have been quite content to be a village Kapellmeister. His life being reasonably complete, his spirit would not have roamed the Universe crying for rest. The ideals of his wife were so low and commonplace that she influenced his career by antithesis. His soul was ahungered for the bread of life, and stones were given him in way of the dull, the ugly, the affected, the smug, the ridiculous. Wagner's life was a revolt from the ossified commonplace, a struggle for right adjustment—a heart tragedy. And all this reaching out of the spirit, all the prayers, hopes, fears and travail of his soul, are told and told again in his poetry and in his music.
All art is autobiography.