All this while the understanding between himself and von Bülow's wife had evidently been quietly ripening. Reading between the lines of his earlier accounts of Cosima, it is easy to see that there had been for some time a tentative if unavowed rapprochement between them. In 1861, when taking leave of Cosima at Reichenhall, she gave him, he says, "an almost timid look of enquiry,"[223]—which strikes the old Wagnerian hand as one of those phrases in which the composer conceals more than he discloses.
By the following summer, matters had evidently matured a little. "The increasing and often excessive ill-humour of poor Hans, who seemed to be always in torment, had sometimes drawn a helpless sigh from me. On the other hand Cosima appeared to have lost the timidity (Scheu) towards me that I had noticed during my visit to Reichenhall in the previous year; she was now more friendly. One day, after I had sung 'Wotan's Farewell' to my friends in my own way, I noticed on Cosima's face the same expression that, to my astonishment, I had seen there when bidding her good-bye at Zürich; only now the ecstasy of it was raised to a serene transfiguration. There was silence and mystery over everything now; but the belief that she was mine took hold of me with such certainty, that in moments of more than normal excitement I behaved in the most extravagantly riotous way."[224]
He visits the Bülows both before and after his Russian concerts (March 1863), and again in November of the year, after the concerts at Budapest, Prague and elsewhere. Bülow being busy on the latter occasion with preparations for a concert of his own, Wagner went for a drive with Cosima. "This time all our jocularity gave way to silence; we gazed into each other's eyes without speaking, and a passionate longing for an avowal of the truth overpowered us and brought us to a confession—which needed no words—of the infinite unhappiness that weighed upon us. It gave us relief. Profoundly appeased, we won sufficient cheerfulness to go to the concert without feeling oppressed.... After the concert we had to go to a supper at my friend Weitzmann's, the length of which reduced us, yearning as we were for the profoundest soul's peace, to almost frantic despair. But at last the day came to an end, and after a night spent under Bülow's roof I resumed my journey. Our farewell so strongly reminded me of that first wonderfully affecting parting from Cosima at Zürich, that all the intervening years vanished from me like a wild dream between two days of the highest life's significance. If on that first occasion our presentiment of something not yet understood constrained us to silence, it was no less impossible to give voice to what we now recognised but did not utter."[225] Here again, anyone familiar with Wagner's literary manner must feel instinctively that there is a great deal more beneath these words than appears on the surface of them. This is the last reference to Cosima in Mein Leben: the further story of the pair has to be derived from other sources.
The Zürich leave-taking to which he refers can only be that of the 16th August 1858, the day before he was compelled to leave the "Asyl" as a result of the Mathilde catastrophe. His account of the farewell in Mein Leben, however, does not suggest any special community of feeling between himself and Cosima; all that he says is that "on the 16th August the Bülows left; Hans was dissolved in tears, Cosima was gloomy and silent." If it were not for the tragedy of it, the situation would be decidedly piquant: Wagner, on the very eve of his severance from one man's wife, finding some consolation in the look that another man's wife gives him, and assuring us,—or was it simply Cosima, his unofficial wife and amanuensis of the hour, that he was assuring?—that all the passion he poured out so eloquently to Mathilde in the days that followed the separation vanished from him, in 1863, "like a wild dream" at another look from Cosima. One could understand the elevated affection he felt for this remarkable woman ousting the smokier memories of Friederike Meyer and Blandine Ollivier and the maid-servant Marie, but hardly the luminous figure of Mathilde Wesendonck. Could he really forget so easily, or did he only imagine he forgot, or did he simply wish Cosima to believe he had forgotten? But alas, he forgot Cosima too when she was away from him. As we have seen, during his stay at Frau Wille's at Mariafeld, after his flight from his Vienna creditors (March 1864) he had it in his mind to restore his broken finances by means of a rich marriage.[226] Kapp conjectures that the lady he had in view was Henriette von Bissing, the sister of Frau Wille. (She had recently been left a widow, with a considerable fortune.) It is certain that Frau von Bissing and he had been drawn very close together at the end of 1863. When he went to Breslau in November, he tells us, she put up at the same hotel, listened sympathetically to his story of his woes and his financial difficulties, and dissuaded him from his projected Russian tour, promising to give him "the not inconsiderable sum necessary to maintain me in independence for some time to come."[227] But she found some difficulty in getting the needful funds from her family, "from whom she was meeting with the most violent opposition, apparently spiced with calumnies against myself." Plunged more and more deeply into debt, he at last appeals point blank to the lady for "a clear declaration not as to whether she could help me at once, but whether she would, as I could no longer stave off ruin." "She must," he says, "have been very deeply wounded by something that had been told her of which I knew nothing, for her to be able to bring herself to answer somewhat to this effect—'You want to know finally whether I will or will not? Well then, in God's name, No!'" He accounts for this answer afterwards, as might be expected, by "the weakness of her not very independent character," particulars of which he had had from Frau Wille.[228]
Knowing him as well as we do, and knowing his trick of explaining every unpleasantness in other people's conduct towards him in a way that lays the blame with them rather than with himself, we can hardly accept his own account of the affair as the last possible word on the subject. It would be interesting to have Frau von Bissing's version of it. But if he has given us the events in their true sequence, Kapp's theory is untenable, for the rupture with Frau von Bissing must have taken place before the Mariafeld conversation on the subject of a divorce. It is not impossible, however, that he is anticipating the story of the severance from Frau von Bissing by a page or two.[229]
In May 1864 came his dramatic rescue by King Ludwig. His financial troubles were, for a time, at an end. And now the stage was clear for the last act of the drama in which he and Cosima were the principal actors. As the autobiography ends with the summons to Munich by King Ludwig, we are henceforth without any guidance from Wagner himself. We can imagine, however, that for a man of his temperament the necessity for feminine companionship soon became urgent. Minna was now out of the question; his other flames—Mathilde Wesendonck, Friederike Meyer, Mathilde Maier, Henriette von Bissing—had one by one died out. Only Cosima remained; and for the man who, with the turn of his fiftieth year, began to love with his reason more than with his senses, the masterful Cosima was obviously the one woman in the world for him. She had apparently never loved Bülow, nor he her; we are told that his marriage with her was an act of chivalry on his part, due to the desire to legitimise in the eyes of the world the illegitimate daughter of the Liszt whom he so admired and loved. The truth seems to have slowly dawned on Cosima that it was her mission in life to tend the buffeted composer of genius. He must have admired her both for her insight and her indomitable will; and no admirer of Wagner would grudge him the splendid instrument for his purposes that came to him in Cosima after so many years of delusion and disappointment. But it is tolerably clear that the pair, in the egoism of their devotion to each other, acted with a total lack of regard either for Bülow's feelings or for his position in the eyes of the world. In 1864, Bülow, at Wagner's request, sent Cosima and his own child to keep the lonely musician company in his Starnberg villa; and apparently at this time all barriers between the two were broken down, though their love for each other was still concealed from Bülow, who came to them in July at Wagner's request. Wagner persuaded the King to appoint Bülow his Court pianist—his avowed object being to rescue Hans from his unpleasant artistic surroundings in Berlin, the real object, as Kapp says, being "to keep the beloved woman near him."
In October Wagner settled in the Munich house placed at his disposal by the King, and the Bülows took up their residence in the capital in the following month. Cosima constituted herself Wagner's secretary and general woman of affairs, two rooms being provided for her in his house, where she worked for several hours each day. On the 10th April 1865, a daughter, Isolde, was born to Cosima. Bülow believed the child to be his own,[230] and Wagner became its godfather. In reality the child was Wagner's own. (A second child, Eva, was born to them 18th February 1867 at Tribschen; Siegfried was born 6th June 1869.)
On the 25th January 1866 Minna died in Dresden. As soon as Cosima heard of it, Cornelius tells us, she telegraphed to Wagner, who was in Geneva at the time, asking whether she should come at once to him; he advised her to wait. But while Bülow was on a concert tour in March she went to Geneva and stayed three weeks with Wagner. His unpopularity in Munich had made it imperative for the King, however unwillingly, to request him to leave the city. He and Cosima now looked out for a Swiss refuge, and at the end of March found the ideal retreat in Tribschen, near Lucerne. There Cosima joined him, with her children, on the 12th May 1866. A letter from Wagner to her arrived in Munich after she had left. "It was opened by Bülow, who thought it might contain something that it would be necessary to telegraph to his wife; it revealed to him the whole bitter truth."[231] His position was an unenviable one, Munich gossip already making very free with his name. He went to Tribschen, and learned that Cosima was resolved not to return to him. He agreed to a dissolution of the marriage, but stipulated that, out of regard for himself, and to give pause to the malice of the world, Cosima should not be united to Wagner for another two years, which time she was to spend with her father in Rome. She refused him this concession; and Bülow, after remaining in the house two months, in the hope of giving a démenti to Munich tittle-tattle, retired to Basle, leaving his family with Wagner.
In April 1867 King Ludwig appointed Bülow Court Kapellmeister. At the same time the King asked Wagner to superintend some projected performances of Lohengrin and Tannhäuser, which necessitated his frequent visits to Munich. Apparently to save appearances, Cosima took up her abode for a time with Bülow at his house in the Arcostrasse, where two rooms were always ready for Wagner's use. But gossip and calumny only raged all the more fiercely, both in the town and in the press. It was openly said of Bülow that he owed his appointment at the Court "to his complaisance as a husband"; and at the end there was nothing for it but for Wagner and Cosima to retire together to Tribschen, and cut the last traces that bound them to Munich and convention. Deeply wounded, Bülow found it impossible to continue his work in the town: he resigned his appointment in June 1869, sent his own two children to Cosima, and went out alone into the world.[232]
The conduct of Wagner and Cosima led to a long estrangement between them and Liszt, and a cooling of other friendships; the King, too, pointedly showed his displeasure. Wagner, in his Tribschen retreat, turned his back angrily upon everyone who disapproved of him, and immersed himself in Siegfried and The Twilight of the Gods. On the 6th June 1869 the birth of a son, Siegfried, sent him into the seventh heaven of delight. Cosima's marriage was dissolved, on Bülow's suit, on 18th July 1870; and on the 25th of the following month she was married to Wagner.