Wagner as a young man, about the time Meyerbeer sponsored the first production of Rienzi in Dresden.
Richard Wagner at the peak of his powers when Der Ring des Nibelungen was nearing completion.
Now in Wagner’s life there appears a strange and beautiful influence, Mathilde Wesendonck, wife of a very wealthy silk merchant. It has been pointed out that under the spell of this beguiling woman his composing flourished as never before. At the home of the Wesendoncks he completed the poem for Tristan und Isolde. It is not known how friendly Richard and Mathilde were, but this is fact: Wagner left his friends’ abode because he would not bring grief upon Otto Wesendonck.
He went once more to Paris where some very ridiculous things happened having to do with a suggested ballet for the opera Tannhäuser. Wagner, adamant, would not change the order of his work merely to please influential gentlemen of the Jockey Club.
In 1864, when Wagner was fifty-one, he settled in Munich—he had been forgiven for his revolutionary surge—and in this musically flourishing city he came under the high patronage of King Ludwig of Bavaria. Here he renewed acquaintance with Liszt’s daughter Cosima, whom he had met some years before. She was now married to Hans von Bülow, a highly gifted conductor. The composer and Cosima were thrown together a lot and their mutual regard soon ripened into love. Poor little Minna, who had been ill for a long period, died in 1866, a piece of news which saddened Wagner greatly.
That same year, however, he and Cosima took a place at Triebschen on Lake Lucerne in Switzerland. Bülow, at first angered by his wife’s deed, soon came to realize the inevitability of it. Besides, he adored Wagner and his music. He acted sanely therefore, sacrificing his personal feelings for the sake of Wagner’s art. Cosima and Richard were married in 1870.
At Triebschen he completed Die Meistersinger, Siegfried, and the first two acts of Götterdämmerung, besides writing any number of treatises, articles, and the like. Here, too, the idea of a great festival theater was born in him, and the originality of the thing soon won many influential supporters to the cause. By 1871 a site was found for it at Bayreuth, Germany. The next year he put the finishing touches to the Ring and the Bayreuth project grew in proportion to his frantic efforts to raise money for it. In all, it took some four years to erect this shrine to Wagnerian music. And finally, the première of the Wagnerian Cycle, running from August 13 to 16, was a tremendous success, in spite of the heartaches, the headaches, and the discouragement.
