The young pianist, Tausig, visits him, and he thinks of him as his son, saying, “My childless marriage is suddenly blest with an interesting phenomenon.”  But the young Tausig gives him unlimited cares, and “devours my biscuits, which my wife doles out grudgingly even to me.”  His allusions to Minna are always full of tender solicitude, though it is evident that she wears upon him.  His temper, peculiarly violent at the slightest opposition, must have been a serious problem under her open disbelief in his genius and his creeds; and yet he thought he could not prosper without her.

In 1860 he is again borrowing money for her, and writing to Liszt: 

“According to a letter; just received, D. thinks it necessary to refuse me the thousand francs I had asked for, and offers me thirty louis d’or instead.  This puts me in an awkward position.  On the one hand I am, as usual, greatly in want of money, and shall decidedly not be able to send my wife to Loden for a cure, unless I receive the subvention I had hoped for.”

These letters to Liszt make a remarkable literature.  The two men were bound together by such artistic sympathy, and Liszt was so much a soldier for Wagner’s crusade, and so ready with financial help, that he was more than friend or brother.  It was, in Wagner’s own phrase, “the gigantic perseverance of his friendship,” that endeared him beyond words to the struggler.  Even Minna seems to have been extremely fond of Liszt—­what woman was not?  It was to Liszt that she was indebted for rescue from downright starvation.  More than this, Minna’s parents were supported via Liszt, and it somewhat beautifies the otherwise unbeautiful spectacle of Wagner’s splendid mendicancy that, when he borrowed, it was as much for his wife and her parents as for himself.

Liszt was not the only friend in need.  There was Frau Julie Ritter, who sent him money from Dresden for several years.

This brings us to a time of stress when Minna began to suffer from the fickleness of some one nearer to her than fortune.  Wagner began to cast meaning glances over the garden wall.  As Mr. Henderson says:  “He was as inconstant as the wind, a rover, and a faithless husband.  His misdoings amounted to more than peccadilloes.”

It was in Zuerich that Wagner gave Minna some other causes for uneasiness than his habit of being late at meals.  Hans Belart, in his “Wagner in Zuerich,” refers to Wagner’s flirtation with Emilie Heim, the wife of a conductor, who lived so near the Wagners that their kitchen-gardens adjoined.  Emilie was a beautiful blonde with a beautiful voice, and she and Wagner were wont to sing duets together, as he wrote them; and she was the soloist in a concert he gave.  How much cause Minna may have had for jealousy, we can hardly know, but it seems certain that she felt she had a sufficiency, and that she made so much ado about it that Wagner found it advisable to move.  In later years he and Emilie met again.  Wagner gave her the pet name of “Sieglinde,” and told her that she should illumine his Walhalla as Freia, the eternal, blue-eyed, gold-haired goddess of spring.  According to Belart, Minna was the inspiration for Wotan’s virtuous but nagging wife Fricka!