“Certainly we shall come, for you are to be the first to whom we shall present ourselves as man and wife.  To get into this state, great patience was required; what has been for years inevitable was not to be brought about until all manner of suffering.  Since last I saw you in Munich, I have not again left my asylum, which, in the meanwhile, has also become the refuge of her who was destined to prove that I could well be helped, and that the axiom of many of my friends that I ’could not be helped’ was false!  She knew that I could be helped, and she helped me:  she has defied every disapprobation and taken upon herself every condemnation.  She has borne to me a wonderfully beautiful and vigorous boy, whom I boldly call ‘Siegfried’:  he is now growing, together with my work, and gives me a new, long life, which at last has attained a meaning.  Thus we get along without the world from which we had retired entirely.  But now listen:  you will, I trust, approve of the sentiment which leads us to postpone our visit until I can introduce to you the mother of my son as my wedded wife.  This will soon be the case, and before the leaves fall we hope to be in Mariafeld.”

A pleasant view of the new domesticity that had come into Wagner’s life is an elaborate surprise he planned for his wife.  He composed with great secrecy the “Siegfried Idyll,” that most royal musical welcome that ever baby had.  Hans Richter collected a band of musical conspirators and rehearsed the work.  On the morning of Cosima’s birthday, the orchestra stealthily collected on the steps of the house, and with Wagner as conductor, and with Hans Richter as trumpeter, Cosima’s thirtieth birthday was ushered in with benevolent auspices, the child being then a year old.  The Idyll itself, as Mr. Finck says, “is not merely an orchestral cradle-song; it is the embodiment of love, paternal and conjugal.”

A new reward for his long and stormy career was the realisation of the Bayreuth dream—­the building with hands of a material castle in Spain.  Besides this opera-house of his own, to be consecrated to his own works, Wagner was given a home.  He and his wife left the villa at Triebschen, on the lake at Lucerne, with much regret.  For there he had been able to work in perfect seclusion, under the protection and forethought of the devoted Cosima.  His new villa at Bayreuth he called “Wahnfried,” setting over the door a fresco of mythological figures, symbolising music and tragedy; in whom are portrayed Cosima Wagner, his final ideal, and Wilhelmine Schroeder-Devrient, who had been his first inspiration, and also figures of Wotan and Siegfried; the former being the portrait of Franz Betz, the singer of the role, and the latter being the child Siegfried Wagner.  Beneath the frescoes he put the words:  “Hier wo mein Waehnen Frieden fand, Wahnfried sei dieses Haus von mir benannt,”—­which may be Englished:  “Here, where my illusions respite found, ‘Illusion-Respite’ let this house by me be crowned.”