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On <\/span>Christmas Day, 1870, the sounds of Wagner\u2019s Siegfried Idyll<\/i> wafted up the staircase of a villa in Switzerland. This beautiful piece \u2013 which has become arguably the composer\u2019s best-loved orchestral work \u2013 was a gift from Wagner, written and rehearsed in secret, for Cosima, his second wife.<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p><\/div> <\/section> The premiere might have been a private and personal event, but Wagner had ensured it would be memorable, enlisting 15 (it\u2019s thought most likely) instrumentalists from the prestigious Tonhalle Orchester Z\u00fcrich, including the famous conductor Hans Richter on trumpet. \u2018Music was sounding, and what music!\u2019 recalled Cosima of the day. \u2018After it had died away, R\u2026 put into my hands the score of his \u201cSymphonic Birthday Greeting\u201d.\u2019<\/p>\n Yes, birthday greeting. For although this was a festive occasion, the music in fact marked Cosima\u2019s birthday, which fell on 24 December but which she always celebrated on Christmas Day. The pair had special reason to mark 1870, too, as after a complicated six-year relationship and three children together, they had finally married on 25 August at the protestant church in Lucerne.<\/span><\/p>\n For them, it was a respectable seal of approval on a scandalous relationship. Cosima and Richard had first encountered each other in 1853 when she was a teenager, and he came to visit her father, the composer Franz Liszt. In the 1860s they fell in love. Wagner was still married to Minna Planer \u2013 although his extra-marital dalliances had effectively ended this relationship \u2013 while Cosima had married the conductor Hans von B\u00fclow. A great champion of Wagner\u2019s music, it was, ironically, thanks to Von B\u00fclow that Wagner and Cosima started to spend time together. In November 1863, \u2018with tears and sobs,\u2019 wrote Wagner, \u2018we sealed our confession to belong to each other alone\u2019. They embarked on an affair.<\/span><\/p>\n In 1865, King Ludwig II of Bavaria became Wagner\u2019s patron. At the composer\u2019s suggestion, Von B\u00fclow was taken on as \u2018royal pianist\u2019 while Cosima ostensibly became Wagner\u2019s secretary. They all moved to Munich. By then, the penny had dropped for Von B\u00fclow, his suspicions cemented rather belatedly by the birth of Isolde, Cosima\u2019s first child <\/span>with Wagner, in April 1865. <\/span><\/p>\n