Word: minna
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Obligation. The letters deal largely with the period of Wagner's tempestuous first marriage (to Actress Minna Planer), when he composed The Flying Dutchman, Tannähuser, Lohengrin and Tristan und Isolde, and they hardly reveal a new Richard Wagner. Rather, they amplify the old one-the "Archegotist" who called on his friends to pick up the checks and often gave them his scorn in return, the German genius who believed the world owed him both a living and its unbounded love, and offered it great operas in return...
...letter to wife Minna, demanding separation after 14 years of bickering marriage, he further uncloaks his character. ". . . You cling to the peacefulness and permanence of existing conditions-I must break them to satisfy my inner being; you are capable of sacrificing everything ... to 'have a respected position in the community,' which I despise . . . You think only of the past, with nostalgia and yearning-I give that up and think only of the future . . . You cling to people, I to causes; you to certain human beings, I to humanity...
Articulation. As Editor Burk sees it, there were four times in self-centered Richard Wagner's life when he "really lost his head over a woman." His love for Minna was violent, "but because it had no basis in artistic sympathy could not last." He was drawn to two others but "the circumstance .. . tore them apart." (The precise circumstance: they were both married.) But such circumstances did not stop Wagner from running off with the wife of his friend Hans von Bülow, who conducted the first performance of Tristan. Cosima von Bülow, illegitimate daughter...
Last week Minna died at 80, a wealthy and dignified dowager. Ada sent her body to Virginia for a burial befitting a Southern gentlewoman...
There they lived in quiet and almost anonymous grandeur, writing poetry, attending first nights, and occasionally taking European tours. Though they kept their gilded piano, they never mentioned the old days. Said Minna: "We like to meet old friends, but not old customers...