1870 was a momentous year, and not only for Wagner. In July France declared war on Prussia. As winter came on it was obvious that the French were beaten, and in November Wagner took time from the completion of the Ring to write the notorious "Eine Kapitulation," a ribald farce disparaging the French in the coarsest terms, which he blithely asked Hans Richter to set to music in the manner of Offenbach. Also in July, Hans von Bülow's marriage to Liszt's daughter Cosima—who had long been Wagner's mistress and borne him a son, Siegfried, in 1869—was dissolved. Wagner and Cosima were married in the Protestant Church in Lucerne on August 25, 1870. On Christmas morning of that year the Wagner household wakened to the strains of the Siegfried Idyll, secretly composed as a present to Cosima. Nietzsche, a friend of the family, was present. Looking back in 1888 in "Ecce Homo," as his last glimmer of sanity was being snuffed out by a syphilitic infection, he asked, "What did I never forgive Wagner? That he condescended to the Germans—that he became reichsdeutsch." The Reich, or new German Empire—the German duchies united under Prussia's control—was proclaimed in Versailles' Hall of Mirrors in January 1871. Wilhelm I of Prussia was declared Kaiser. And to make French humiliation complete, Prussian soldiers marched down the Champs Élysées in February. Throughout the books of his last creative decade, Nietzsche taxed Wagner with being less a musician than an actor. Having achieved prominence as a great German composer, augmenting the line of Mozart and Beethoven while plumbing the depths of the Teutonic soul in his Ring operas, Wagner involved himself in the nationalist fervor attending the new Reich. A jingoistic poem of five stanzas, "To the German Army Before Paris," celebrating German conquest and the Reich, was sent to Bismarck at Versailles, who replied with congratulations on Wagner's artistic triumph over the Parisians. That could only have been sweet—events had cruelly avenged him for the miserable years, 1839-1841, when Paris had been deaf to his genius and had him clapped into debtors' prison, and for the 1861 Tannhäuser débâcle. Complementing his literary sallies, he composed the Kaisermarsch early in 1871 to celebrate Emperor and Reich in putatively stirring tones—swaggering, pompous, vacuous, repetitive, mingling Luther's Ein feste' Burg with bombast. Scored initially for military band, Wagner later recast it for orchestra with a choral finale that is almost always dropped.

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