Note 70 — Chapter I · THE MAN
Reading edition
Wagner's candour about Minna contrasts strongly with the concealments the worshipping Wagnerian biographers practise with regard to the fact of his son Siegfried being born out of wedlock. At the end of the first volume of the Glasenapp Life, for example, is a genealogical table of the Wagner family from 1643. It ends thus:—
WILHELM RICHARD WAGNER (1813-83) Married (first) 1836, Christine Wilhelmine Planer (1814-66), secondly Cosima Wagner [sic], née Liszt (born 1837)
Helferich Siegfried Richard Wagner, born 6th June 1869.
It will be seen that the date of Wagner's marriage with Cosima, which must have been perfectly well known to Glasenapp, is deliberately omitted; nor is there any mention of the two daughters Cosima bore Wagner while she was still von Bülow's wife, or indeed of the fact that she had previously been married to von Bülow.