Richard Wagner Author:Frederic Taber Cooper Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III THE GENESIS OF A WORK OF ART—AN ASYLUM: AN OASIS IN THE DESERT—A ROMANTIC LOVE— FROM REAL LIFE TO THE WORLD OF THOUGHT AND OF ART IN leaving Dr... more »esden, Wagner abandoned a settled, and on the whole a brilliant position. Nevertheless, yielding to what he afterwards called the omnipotence of folly, he had conceived the idea that Dresden was likely to become "the tomb of his art." Accordingly, he resigned himself to exile and retirement, preoccupied with the single purpose of accomplishing his task, and quite indifferent to riches and honors. Study, the joy of meditating and philosophizing, the confidence of a few chosen friends, who faithfully awaited the fruition of his original thoughts, a sufficiently warm dressing gown, a good piano and the attachment ofhis pet dog and parrot, were to him amply sufficient. But Minna Wagner, from this time forth, took an entirely different view of their mode of existence. So long as he had occupied an enviable position, she had not been unreasonably disturbed by her husband's chimerical dreams and by an idealism so ill adapted to the immediate needs of his contemporaries. But now she regarded it as sheer folly for him to turn deliberately aside from the beaten path, and devote himself, as he was now doing, to the preaching of a new gospel. All that her husband said or wrote, his music, his slightest actions seemed to her the conduct of a visionary. Furthermore, she suffered from the loss of those material advantages, with which Wagner, absorbed in his dreams, could so easily dispense. "I shall never turn my art-works into merchandise," he once wrote to Liszt, who from the first had estimated him at his true value. But Minna Wagner was far from sharing a philosophy so Utopian in its conceptions.She rejoined her husband at Zurich ...« less