Minna wrote as follows: 

“The malicious rumours concerning my husband, which have been for some time published by Vienna and Munich newspapers, oblige me to declare that I have received from him up to this day an income amply sufficient for my maintenance.  I take this opportunity with the more pleasure as it enables me to put an end to at least one of the numerous calumnies launched against my husband.”

A few weeks later, on January 25, 1866, she died at Dresden of heart disease.  She had suffered all the miseries that earn success, without ever tasting their sweets.  To say whether or not she deserved to taste the sweets would demand a more ruthless and unforgiving verdict upon one of the two unfortunates than I have the heart to render.  The marriage had been the wedding of a near-sighted woman and a man who could see hardly anything nearer than the Pleiades.  Neither was more to blame than the other for the fault of eyesight.  It was simply a case of connubial astigmatism.

While Wagner was living on terms of strange intimacy with the young king, he was accused of Oriental luxury.  The selection of the rainbow furnishings of his house and of his own dressing-gowns, which made Joseph’s coat mere negligee, was not altogether his own, but showed the unmistakable guiding hand of a woman.  Frau Cosima von Buelow acted as a sort of secretary to Wagner.  She was the daughter of Liszt; her mother was the Comtesse d’Agoult, who wrote under the name of “Daniel Stern,” and with whom Liszt had lived for a few years.  Cosima had married Hans von Buelow in 1857.

Von Buelow had in his earlier years been greatly befriended by Liszt and by Wagner.  In 1850, when Von Buelow was about twenty years old, Wagner and Liszt both had written to his mother, who was then divorced, begging her to let her son take up music.  Like Schumann’s mother, she opposed music as a career, but Von Buelow persisted, and became Liszt’s pupil.  Wagner was to Von Buelow a god.  It was a pitiful practical joke that Fate should have directed the god’s favour toward the worshipper’s wife.  But those ugly old maids, the Fates, have never had a sense of good form.

As early as 1864 Wagner had written to Frau Wille, complaining of Von Buelow’s misfortunes, and saying:  “Add to this a tragic marriage; a young woman of extraordinary, quite unprecedented endowment, Liszt’s wonderful image, but of superior intellect.”  Wagner persuaded the king to make Von Buelow court pianist, and later court conductor.  There are very pretty accounts of the musical at-homes of the Von Buelows and Wagner.

Then Wagner’s popularity with the king eventually raised such hostility that, at the king’s request, he left the country to save his life.  He was again an exile.  Cosima, with her two children, went with him, and later Von Buelow came, but he soon had to go to Basle to earn his living as a piano teacher, and left his family at Lucerne.  There exists a letter from Wagner’s cook, telling a friend of how the king came incognito to visit Wagner, and how the house was upset by the descent of Cosima and her children.  They had come to stay.  At Triebschen, near Lucerne, Wagner lived with the Von Buelow family, and began to know contentment.