WILHELM RICHARD WAGNER (1813-83)
Married (first) 1836, Christine Wilhelmine Planer (1814-66), secondly
Cosima Wagner [sic], née Liszt (born 1837)
Helferich Siegfried Richard Wagner, born 6th June 1869.
It will be seen that the date of Wagner's marriage with Cosima, which must have been perfectly well known to Glasenapp, is deliberately omitted; nor is there any mention of the two daughters Cosima bore Wagner while she was still von Bülow's wife, or indeed of the fact that she had previously been married to von Bülow.
[71] Richard Wagner to Mathilde Wesendonck, p. 273.
[72] Ibid., p. 372. The italics are Mr. Ellis's own. He does not offer any evidence in support of this charge. He merely remarks loftily that "it is too long an argument to set forth here."
[73] Wagner writes thus to Otto Wesendonck on the 25th June 1861, seventeen days before the letter to Mathilde: "In this anxious time [the Paris Tannhäuser fiasco had occurred three months before, and his prospects were unusually black], when any resolution is impossible for me, and I am incapable of any mental effort, everything conspires to grieve me. The dear little dog that you once gave me died the day before yesterday, quite suddenly and in an almost inexplicable way. I had become so used to the gentle animal, and the manner of its death, everything, distressed me greatly." Briefe Richard Wagners an Otto Wesendonck, pp. 99, 100.
[74] "Nach dem Vorfalle," which may mean either "after the accident," or "after the occurrence."
[75] Mein Leben, pp. 765, 766.
[76] Mein Leben, p. 631.
[77] Mein Leben had not been given to the world at the time Mr. Ellis wrote; but in the Richard Wagner und die Tierwelt of the well-known Wahnfried partisan Hans von Wolzogen occurs this passage: "but the little dog died suddenly in the confusion of Paris, perhaps poisoned." (Quoted in Glasenapp, iii. 330.) These last words are probably due either to a private reading of the then unpublished Mein Leben, or to conversations in the Wagner circle. Again there is no evidence: we are simply left with Wagner's own words in Mein Leben and the two Wesendonck letters.