The Fortnightly Review: No. CCCCLXIII, New Series [‎613r] (116/239)

RICHARD AND MINNA WAGNER.
Now that the publication of Richard Wagner’s letters to Mathilde
Wesendonck has drawn renewed attention to the unhappiness of
his own first marriage—an unhappiness of profounder origin than
I am at present permitted to state—it is of peculiar interest to gain
another side-light on the latter ; a side-light which throws into still
greater relief the truth of his remark, to his sister Clara, on the
hopelessness of all attempts to “reason with Minna’s reason.”
The document I am about to produce made its first appearance in
Germany so recently as last February, in the appendix to a
voluminous collection of the letters of Peter Cornelius, nephew of
the great painter, and well-known himself as poet-composer; it is
a letter to Cornelius, though, from Richard Wagner, who has
just consigned himself to melancholy solitude beside the Rhine, for
composition of the music of his Meistersinger. But we must first
go a little way back, to Richard’s second severance from Minna.
After their first parting in August 1858, the causes whereof are
fully set forth in a letter to his sister (see preface, R. Wagner to
M. Wesendonck), husband and wife had come together again in
the autumn of 1859, and dwelt in Paris, by no means in peace
and harmony, yet with much exercise of patience on his side, until
June, 1861. Here Otto Wesendonck himself had visited them in
the spring, and that visit might have taught a lesson to any less
stubbornly suspicious mind than Minna’s. Yet in the said June,
just as the Wagners were making every arrangement to settle
down in permanence at Carlsruhe, a swift catastrophe occurred,
and by the middle of July we find them taking opposite paths, with
no prospect of reunion—separated, in fact, by everything but
human law.
The precise nature of that Paris catastrophe is not on record,
but may be inferred from the deep gloom that overcasts all
Wagner’s letters of those two dread months; from his veiled
allusions to the ‘ ‘ mysteriously sudden ’ ’ death of the four-footed
pet Frau Wesendonck once had given him—“ With that little dog I
buried much! ”—and from Minna’s unequivocal hint to a female
correspondent that it was “ the Tristans ” who had set her roaming
once again. That inference I have drawn elsewhere, namely, that
Minna’s wrath had been rekindled by discovery of a packet of
Mathilde’s letters; but this fresh document converts it to a cer
tainty. No matter how platonic, how demure the contents of those