free fight broke out behind the scenes; the prima donna's husband smote
the second tenor, her lover, and every one joined in; even that small
audience was dismissed. In this company _die erste Liebhaberin_ was
Wilhelmine Planer, one of twelve children of a poor spindle-maker. When
the Magdeburg company went to pieces, Wagner went to Leipzig and
offered the opera to a manager, whose daughter was the chief singer.
The manager said that he could not permit his daughter to appear in
such a work. Eventually, Wagner drifted to Königsberg, where he became
director of the theatre, and where Wilhelmine had found a position. The
two had become engaged in Magdeburg, and they were married at
Königsberg, on November 24, 1836.

The theatre soon followed the example of that at Magdeburg and went
into bankruptcy. During the honeymoon year, Wagner had composed only
one work, an overture, based on "Rule Britannia." At that time "The Old
Oaken Bucket" had not been written. He then drifted to Riga, where he
became music-director and his wife a singer. Now his relentless
ambition seized him and he determined to consecrate the rest of his
life to glory. His wife found herself consecrated to poverty and the
fanatic ideals of a husband, to whom starvation was only a detail in
the scheme of his life,--a scheme and a life for which she had neither
inclination nor understanding.

Wilhelmine, or Minna, as she was called, is described as pretty by some
and as of a "pleasing appearance," by others. The painter Pecht called
her very pretty, but blamed her for a sober, unimaginative soul.
Richard Pohl calls her a prosaic domestic woman, who never understood
her husband, and who might have been an impediment to his far-reaching
ideas, if Richard Wagner could have been impeded in his career by
anything. Wagner himself seems to have been genuinely fond of her,