The relations of Wagner and Cosima rapidly grew intimate enough to torment even the idolatrous Von Bülow. Riemann says: "Domestic misunderstandings led, in 1869, to a separation, and Von Bülow left the city." One of the "domestic misunderstandings" was doubtless the birth of Siegfried Wagner, June 6, 1869. A speedy divorce and marriage were imperative. The chief difficulty in the securing of the much desired divorce was that Cosima must change her religion, or her "religious profession," to use the more accurate phrase of Mr. Finck, who says that Wagner in his life with her, had "followed the example of Liszt and Goethe and other European men of genius, an example the ethics of which this is not the place to discuss."
Von Bülow secured his divorce in the fall of 1869. He remarried, in 1882, the actress, Marie Schanzer. Wagner and Cosima were married August 25, 1870. This was the twenty-fifth birthday of King Ludwig, and Glasenapp comments glowingly upon the meaning of the marriage:
"To the artist, who in the first great rumblings of the war of 1870-71, greeted the dawn of a new era for his people, the same hour proved to be the beginning of a new chapter. On Thursday, the 25th of August, 1870, in the Protestant Church of Lucerne, in the presence of two witnesses, one, the lifelong friend of the Wagner family, Hans Richter, the other, Miss M.v.M., the wedding of Richard Wagner to Cosima, the divorced wife of Hans von Bülow, was celebrated.
"There is no other union which Germans ought to deem more holy. None have ever been entered into with less selfishness, with higher impersonal sentiments. It united the great homeless one, who had suffered so much and so long under the heartlessness and unappreciative neglect of his contemporaries, to a wife, who stood beside the friend of her father, the ideal of her husband, with cheerful encouragement (mit theilnahmvollster Sorge), until she as well as her husband realised that she was the one chosen to heal the wounds which the artist had suffered in his restless wanderings and through numberless disappointments. The time had arrived when the hand of love prepared the last and never-to-be-lost home.
"This knowledge gave the noble-minded woman the courage to sever the ties, which in early youth had tied her to one of our most eminent artists, and the best of men; to give up herself to her task, to consecrate her life to him, to be the helpmeet of the man to whom through friendship and the inner voice of her heart, and the knowledge of noble duty, she had already belonged. The world did not hesitate to malign this holiest act of fidelity. Only the small and the low are overlooked, the high and the great are ever the victims."
Just two months before the marriage, Wagner had written to Frau Wille, who had invited him and his wife-to-be to visit her, an account of his feelings in the matter, which is beautiful enough and sincere enough to quote at some length:
"Certainly we shall come, for you are to be the first to whom we shall present ourselves as man and wife. To get into this state, great patience was required; what has been for years inevitable was not to be brought about until all manner of suffering. Since last I saw you in Munich, I have not again left my asylum, which, in the meanwhile, has also become the refuge of her who was destined to prove that I could well be helped, and that the axiom of many of my friends that I 'could not be helped' was false! She knew that I could be helped, and she helped me: she has defied every disapprobation and taken upon herself every condemnation. She has borne to me a wonderfully beautiful and vigorous boy, whom I boldly call 'Siegfried': he is now growing, together with my work, and gives me a new, long life, which at last has attained a meaning. Thus we get along without the world from which we had retired entirely. But now listen: you will, I trust, approve of the sentiment which leads us to postpone our visit until I can introduce to you the mother of my son as my wedded wife. This will soon be the case, and before the leaves fall we hope to be in Mariafeld."
A pleasant view of the new domesticity that had come into Wagner's life is an elaborate surprise he planned for his wife. He composed with great secrecy the "Siegfried Idyll," that most royal musical welcome that ever baby had. Hans Richter collected a band of musical conspirators and rehearsed the work. On the morning of Cosima's birthday, the orchestra stealthily collected on the steps of the house, and with Wagner as conductor, and with Hans Richter as trumpeter, Cosima's thirtieth birthday was ushered in with benevolent auspices, the child being then a year old. The Idyll itself, as Mr. Finck says, "is not merely an orchestral cradle-song; it is the embodiment of love, paternal and conjugal."
