Richard Wagner wrote this to his lover Minna Planer at a time when she was far away from him. Throughout his life, he always strove to improve his circumstances. So it is all the more astonishing that he should have married a woman without a dowry. The decisive factor was his passionate love for her, which overcame him when he was just 21 years old, and which became a constant obsession. At first, to be sure, he had imagined that he might keep the upper hand in their relationship and drop his lover whenever he saw fit. But things turned out differently.

The woman he loved was Christiane Wilhelmine Planer, known to all as Minna. She was born on September 5, 1809, into a poor family in Oederan, a little town in the Erzgebirge some 20 miles to the southwest of Dresden, in the kingdom of Saxony. As her birth-cum-baptismal certificate in the church of Oederan confirms, she was four years older than Richard. Minna’s parents were Johanna Christiana, née Meyer (1782–1856), and Gotthelf Planer (1770–1855), who had married on September 25, 1802. Gotthelf was a trumpeter in the Saxon Army, in which capacity he served under Napoleon in the renowned Battle of Wagram against the Austrians in July 1809, just a few miles outside Vienna. His cavalry regiment from Oederan, the so-called Elector’s regiment, suffered heavy losses, and afterwards returned home to Saxony. Johanna Planer gave birth to ten children, some of whom died in infancy.