Amazing as this story is, both with regard to the strange things it asks us to believe of the man and the woman and the husband, it is certain that there was a pretty how-d’ye-do in Zurich.  Minna became so jealous that she drove Wagner, usually so tender in his allusions to her, to use the expression of the ungallant Haydn, saying that, “she was making a hell out of the home.”  Her outbursts of temper were so violent, and her addiction to opium had become so great, that he began to fear for her death by heart disease, and finally for her sanity.  He wrote of her to his friend Frau Ritter: 

“Her condition of mind became such a torment to herself and her surroundings, that a radical change of the situation had to be made, unless we were all willing to wear ourselves out unreasonably....  The state of her education, and her intellectual capacities, make it impossible for her to find in me and my endowments the consolation which she needed so much by way of compensation for the disagreeableness of our material situation.  If this is the source of great anguish to me, it nevertheless makes me pity her with all my heart, and it is my most cordial wish that I may some day be able to afford her lasting consolation in her own way.”

In 1856 she had left him for a time, ostensibly to take a cure.  In 1859 there had been a short reunion, of which Wagner wrote again to Frau Ritter: 

“This period I have also chosen for a reunion with my poor wife.  May Heaven grant that I shall always feel able to carry out patiently my firm and cordial determination of treating her in the most considerate manner.  I confess that my relation to this poor woman, who had so many trials, and is now suffering so much, has always spurred me on to preserve and develop my moral powers.  In all my relations to her I am guided only by the deepest pity with her condition, and I hope confidently that it will always arm me with the persistent patience with which I feel called upon not only to endure the consequences of her illness, but personally to allay them.”

Then he had gone to Venice to continue work on “Tristan,” dreaming there in loneliness of his Isolde, the Wesendonck, whose husband has been well likened to King Mark.  But Venice being within the sphere of Saxon influence, he was afraid to remain long, for fear of arrest.  In 1860 he was granted a partial amnesty, and went to Frankfort to meet his wife, who had been taking treatment near Wiesbaden.  Minna went with him to Paris, and was there at the time of the violent riots, which put an end to “Tannhaeuser,” and doubtless to Minna’s hopes of settling in the Paris she was so fond of.  She began again to vent her indignation that he would not write for the gallery, and the storm grew fiercer and fiercer.  Wagner had written Liszt in 1861 with renewed hope and renewed tenderness: 

“For the present I spend all the good humour I can command on my wife.  I flatter her and take care of her as if she were a bride in her honeymoon.  My reward is that I see her thrive; her bad illness is visibly getting better.  She is recovering and will, I hope, become a little rational in her old age.  Just after I had received your ‘Dante,’ I wrote to her that we had now got out of Hell; I hope Purgatory will agree with her; in which case, we shall perhaps, after all, enjoy a little Paradise.”