Cosima's Diaries

Recordings by Cosima Wagner between 1869 and 1883

Cosima Wagner’s diaries are one of the most extraordinary inner records of nineteenth-century artistic life: part household chronicle, part spiritual notebook, part Bayreuth archive, and part psychological portrait of Wagner’s final years. Across thousands of entries, we see the daily world behind the myth: children, servants, illness, money, visitors, letters, rehearsals, readings, quarrels, weather, politics, music, and moments of almost mystical illumination. The diaries follow Wagner from the intimate Tribschen years through the creation of Bayreuth, the triumph and crisis of the 1876 Ring Festival, the making of Parsifal, the rise and collapse of the Nietzsche relationship, and the darker ideological currents that increasingly gathered around Wahnfried, including Wagner and Cosima’s antisemitism. They are not a neutral record, nor always a comfortable one, but they are indispensable: a vast, intimate, often beautiful, often disturbing window into the household where Wagner’s final works, his self-mythology, and the Bayreuth idea took shape.

The diary entries gathered here cover the years from January 1869 to February 1883, carrying the reader from the last Tribschen years to Wagner’s final days in Venice. Their breadth is astonishing. They are at once a household record, an artistic logbook, a spiritual notebook, a political barometer, and the intimate chronicle of a private circle attempting to become a public institution. Cosima records children’s illnesses, lessons, servants, meals, letters, debts, travel, weather, music-making, rehearsals, guests, books, dreams, religious reflections, and Wagner’s daily moods. The sublime and the administrative are never far apart. A passage on Schopenhauer, Shakespeare, Calderón, Beethoven, or Christ may sit beside anxieties about singers, money, doctors, railway journeys, or household arrangements.

The early years, especially 1869 to 1871, still belong largely to the private world of Tribschen. They are filled with the pressures surrounding Cosima’s separation from Hans von Bülow, her union with Richard Wagner, the birth and childhood of Siegfried, and the intense domestic enclosure in which Wagner’s later work was nurtured. Yet the outside world continually enters: King Ludwig, Munich theatrical politics, the Franco-Prussian War, German nationalism, and the first sustained appearances of Friedrich Nietzsche. Wagner’s work on Siegfried and the wider Ring is recorded not as a distant masterpiece but as something happening in rooms, at the piano, amid children, letters, exhaustion, and sudden exaltation.

From 1871 onward, the diaries begin to turn toward Bayreuth. At first it appears as an idea, almost a visionary solution to the failures of ordinary theatres. Soon it becomes practical reality: sites, architects, patrons, Wagner societies, subscriptions, guarantees, construction, copyists, singers, scenery, and the immense labour of creating a theatre for one artistic purpose. The move to Bayreuth and the building of Wahnfried do not simplify life. They intensify it. The diaries show Bayreuth not merely as a shrine, but as a project beset by money, politics, vanity, devotion, incompetence, faith, and fatigue.

The approach to the 1876 Ring cycle dominates the middle years. The Festival is presented as the culmination of decades of artistic striving, but Cosima’s record makes clear how fragile the whole enterprise was. Every singer, rehearsal, costume, curtain, orchestral problem, and financial arrangement seems capable of threatening the ideal. After the Festival, the tone shifts sharply. The achievement has happened, but its aftermath is troubled by deficit, press hostility, uncertainty about future performances, the proposed Society of Patrons, the founding of the Bayreuther Blätter, and the London concerts undertaken to repair the damage. Bayreuth has succeeded as revelation, but it has also become a burden that must somehow survive in the world.

After 1876, Parsifal gradually becomes the spiritual centre of the diaries. The entries from 1877 to 1882 increasingly revolve around its poem, score, staging, rehearsals, religious atmosphere, and practical realization. The world of the Grail enters the daily life of Wahnfried: Gurnemanz, Kundry, Amfortas, Klingsor, the Flower Maidens, the Temple, the Communion imagery, the question of sacred drama, and the problem of presenting a work that seems to demand reverence from a public theatre. At the same time, Wagner’s health, his travels, his growing weariness, and the family’s movements through Italy and Venice give the later diaries a more autumnal character.

The diaries must also be read with full awareness of their antisemitism. This is not a marginal feature. In the early years, anti-Jewish remarks often cluster around the controversy of Wagner’s Judaism in Music, hostile critics, the press, Meyerbeer, musicians, theatre politics, and questions of assimilation. By the later 1870s and early 1880s, the tone changes. Antisemitism becomes more sweeping, more political, and more programmatic. The entries increasingly connect Jews with finance, journalism, liberalism, modernity, social decay, and Germany’s loss of spiritual identity. The diaries also record Wagner and Cosima reading or discussing figures such as Disraeli, Stoecker, Gobineau, and writings on the so-called Jewish question. By 1881, this hostility has hardened into open sympathy for anti-Jewish agitation and fantasies of expulsion, separation, or emigration. The development is ugly, historically important, and inseparable from the world these diaries disclose.

That ugliness is made more complex, not less, by the fact that Jewish individuals remain present in Wagner’s life and work: friends, patrons, musicians, correspondents, and, most famously in the late Bayreuth circle, Hermann Levi. The diaries therefore reveal not a simple contradiction but a deeper moral failure: Wagner and Cosima could depend on, admire, or work intimately with individual Jews while still interpreting Jewishness itself through hostile and dehumanizing abstractions. Any serious encounter with these diaries must resist both sanitizing this material and reducing the whole archive to it.

The Nietzsche story forms another major arc. In 1869, Nietzsche enters as a brilliant young philologist and soon becomes a cherished visitor, correspondent, and intellectual ally. The early diaries record excitement over his writings, especially the work that would become central to the Wagnerian cause, The Birth of Tragedy. During the Bayreuth years he appears as part of the wider hope for a new German culture, one that might unite art, philosophy, and spiritual renewal. Yet the relationship gradually frays. His ill health, his independence, the influence of Paul Rée, his rejection of Schopenhauer, and the publication of Human, All Too Human transform him in the Wagners’ eyes from disciple into apostate. By the later entries, Nietzsche is remembered with bitterness, as a figure of disappointment, ingratitude, and betrayal.

What makes these diaries invaluable is precisely their mixture of greatness and blindness. They reveal the daily climate in which Wagner’s late works were conceived, defended, mythologized, and institutionalized. They show Bayreuth being born out of metaphysical ambition and practical desperation. They show Parsifal emerging from religious longing, theatrical calculation, bodily decline, and cultural polemic. They show friendship turning into estrangement, devotion turning into dogma, and spiritual aspiration entangled with prejudice. To read Cosima’s diaries is to enter the workshop, chapel, battlefield, and household of Wagner’s final years.

Year

Month

1869• 1870• 1871• 1872• 1873• 1874• 1875• 1876• 1877• 1878• 1879• 1880• 1881• 1882• 1883

Jan• Feb• Mar• Apr• May• Jun• Jul• Aug• Sep• Oct• Nov• Dec

Showing entries for February 1874 (21 total)

Date	Word Count	Subject	Content
February 1, 1874	148	She welcomes the end of a painful month with the hope that a new one may bring relief, even while knowing that some forms of sorrow simply do not change with time. The day circles around the limits of representation as they visit the photographer, compare photography to science and painting to philosophy, and end in cold weather, a short walk, and a thoughtful reading on the Greeks.	Sunday, February 1: Farewell, January, with all your sorrow and pain! It is good the way one divides up time, for then one says to oneself: This month was bad, the next will be better; but there is also a kind of experience that alters nothing. Today to the photographer's! R. can scarcely be painted, how can one photograph him? Conversing about it, we decide that photography's claim to replace painting is like that of science to replace philosophy. I gaze upon the Brussels portrait of R. and say to him, “What fills me with melancholy is that in it your eyes never seek mine.” “They are not seeking anything,” he replies. “For me the world is completely dead.” A walk in the afternoon, the weather is cold, and R. loses patience. We return home. In the evening Fr. Schlegel's book on Greeks and Romans, read with interest the chapter on Diotima.
February 2, 1874	74	The day moves between practical household changes and a sense that the larger project may be turning a corner: a letter to the King is being prepared, and a new servant family arrives from Berlin. In the evening, the mood softens into intellectual pleasure as the old Gibbon is taken up again with genuine delight.	Sunday, February 2: R. writes to the King, discussing in his letter the vocation of the German princes. Councilor D. wrote to me that the winds blowing from Hohenschwangau seem more favorable now to our enterprise than previously. In the afternoon our new servants arrive, a man, his wife, and three children, from Berlin. In the evening we pick up our old Gibbon again after a long break, with great enjoyment (Honorius, death of Stilicho, etc.).
February 3, 1874	150	The new house and the newly arrived household are checked on, while R. finishes his letter to the King and gathers the evening copyists around music. The session becomes a lesson in listening, with Haydn and Weber treated as examples of clarity, force, and tonal brilliance, before a bizarre exchange with a Macedonian visitor adds an odd comic note.	Monday, February 3: To the new house in the morning, to see how the newly arrived family, complete with canary and Bible, is getting along. R. finishes his letter to the King. In the evening the copyists' group, enriched by a Macedonian, Herr Lalas, sent by Richter, who has now become director of the opera in Pest. R. goes through Haydn's D major Symphony with them, then he plays the Andante in G minor from another symphony, explaining its beauties, above all its concision: everything expresses something, no arabesques, the two themes circle around each other like sun and moon. Of Weber's Jubelouverture, R. says that it made him for the first time conscious of the brilliance of E major. At the end of the evening a strange conversation with the Macedonian, who claims to descend from the ancient Greeks and prefers the German neo-Greek pronunciation to the Greek (Idipus instead of Oidipus).
February 4, 1874	111	News that Schott may be interested in the proposal offers a brief opening, but the day is otherwise shadowed by delay and tension around the King’s response and the looming public consequences. Her failing eyes and growing isolation deepen the gloom, and she ends the day feeling unable to speak or move outward into the world.	Tuesday, February 4: Herr Schott seems interested in R.'s proposal. Yesterday R. sent off his letter to the King. I have not read it. Went to the photographer's with the children in their costumes for the King. Returned home late, which vexes R.; he is in a state of torment just now, wondering whether the date can be adhered to if the King now gives the guarantee, and he is worried about the turmoil which will result. A gloomy evening in consequence. My sick eyes condemn me to idleness, and I am becoming more and more turned in on myself. At times I feel that I shall never be able to speak again.
February 5, 1874	241	R.’s temper flares over a rights dispute, and she has to steady him after what feels like another example of petty opportunism. Later, more discouraging replies arrive from potential supporters of the guarantee fund, though the couple forces themselves to laugh and keep going despite the bad prospects and her inability to read.	Wednesday, February 5: Went to the house in the morning. When I returned, I found R. beside himself with rage. Herr J. J. Weber is laying claim to the rights in the text of Der Ring des Nibelungen which R. has assigned to Herr Schott. I manage with difficulty to calm R. down over this bit of sharp practice. It is the fact that nobody is indignant over Herr Weber's behavior which so upsets him. I tell him: “We have the theoretical knowledge of Man's wickedness, the others the practical knowledge; that is why they are never indignant, but just protect themselves with provisos. They do not want to acknowledge the theory, because the doctrine of the sin of existence and the wickedness of the human race contains too much ugly truth for them.” In the afternoon a letter from friend Heckel says that the Grand Duke of Baden regrets not being able to do what R. asks, since he is convinced the step would prove unsuccessful. And Herr Wesendonck is prepared, “with reservations,” to subscribe 700 thalers to the guarantee fund. We, R. and I, cannot help laughing. “One has done one’s best,” R. says. “I didn't expect much, but one acts as if one expects something and leaves nothing untried.” In the evening, Gibbon, always with enjoyment. Unfortunately my eye is not yet sufficiently restored to allow me to do the reading. R. is still very indignant over Herr Bate and Herr Weber.
February 6, 1874	49	With her eyes still too weak for work, the evening reading becomes his responsibility, and even their reflections on Roman heroism carry a bitter political edge. The mention that preparations for `Rienzi` are underway in Venice keeps the broader artistic world in view, but the atmosphere remains constrained by illness and fatigue.	Thursday, February 6: My eye prevents my reading or writing. R. takes over the reading in the evening. As we are admiring individual acts of heroism among the last of the Romans, R. says, “They go down like men, the French like apes.” They are preparing to do Rienzi in Venice.
February 7, 1874	90	A springlike walk with the children and then with R. does little to lift her exhaustion, and she confesses to deep weariness and even a longing for death. Their precarious situation with the theater and the unsettling nighttime heart episode leave her physically shaken and emotionally depleted.	Friday, February 7: Springlike weather. Went for a walk with the children in the morning and with R. in the afternoon (Rollwenzel). Great inner weariness, longings for death. The sight of the theater now actually offends me. “Perhaps something still unforeseen will come along,” R. says, “since the known factors on which we built have so completely deserted us.” Read Gibbon. In the night I am beset by a congestion of the heart which drives me to R. It gives up after a little while, but I am left feeling very limp.
February 8, 1874	421	Unsettled weather mirrors the feeling that she and R. have been pushed outside ordinary life, while practical worries about the builders and the King’s reliability force them to consider paying debts from her savings. Between a strange dream, a foolish play, and another hurtful remark from Daniella, her despair grows into a raw sense of her heart being shattered yet still held together by habit and endurance.	Saturday, February 8: Snow flurries! The weather throws us this way and that. More and more I get the feeling that R. and I have been banished from the world. “Can you say where our home is?” R. has invited the copyists, along with Herr Runckwitz; nice, good people. The building supervisor tells us about the harshness of the foremen, who have been declaring in all the taverns that they intend to sue the management committee unless they are paid. The sum involved is now only 5,000 florins, and R. and I decide to pay them from my small savings if the King deserts us again. They are preparing Rienzi in Venice and send a telegram asking whether Orsini is a “Baryton absolu,” to which R. replies that he has no knowledge of either a relative or an absolute baritone and that in Germany singers count it an honor to appear in his works. R. tells me about a dream in which he attended a performance of Der fliegende Holländer with me, and in the third act, after the Dutchman's declaration of jealousy, the scene suddenly changed back to the spinning room, in which there were three policemen; in despair R. had cried out, “Heavens, what are they doing with my things?” In the evening Gibbon (Chrysostom) and a play sent by the secretary of the University of Strasbourg, Dr. Schricker; based, so the author assures us, on impressions received from Lohengrin, Die Meistersinger, etc., the play, Bertha the Spinner, is the most pitiful hotchpotch one can possibly imagine! R. reads me a sentence from his State and Religion about the duties of a politician, and says: “Bismarck could quote that against me, though in any case, if he does do something for my undertaking, he will not be acting like a politician. In the whole of history only one man, Pericles, has ever found a nation which supported his ideals.” Another sad piece of behavior from Daniella, some derogatory words about the copyists, has wounded me deeply. I have an image of the heart as a block of granite which has been broken up, and now its original pattern is being pieced together like a mosaic. One still recognizes it, but it is in pieces. However, the skeleton stays firm, and in me there arose a complaint against this physical strength which persists unimpaired though the heart is already in pieces. Fervently I longed for death, for one of the main tasks of my life I shall be unable to achieve. Reflected on the Chandala maiden!
February 9, 1874	78	A letter from Schott finally allows the contract to be settled on what R. sees as honorable terms, briefly easing the uncertainty around the enterprise. Even so, the King’s request for formal guarantees and the need for further opinions keep the future performances unresolved and still dependent on outside judgment.	Sunday, February 9: Letters from Herr Schott. R. and he conclude the contract, which, in R.'s words, “is equally honorable for both sides.” In the afternoon comes a letter from friend Feustel, saying the King has asked for a formulation of the guarantee and at the same time for an expert opinion from the management committee. Considerations as to whether the performances will be possible, in the year '75, after all. R. writes to Brandt and Hoffmann in this connection.
February 10, 1874	409	After a week of poor eyesight, she returns to the diary with the sense that both the work and the household are burdening R. at once. A faulty piano arrangement, delays in preparing the score, and continued house troubles feed her fear that he will overtax himself, even as family moments and the arrival of a new piano stir memory and tenderness.	Monday, February 10: Did not write in my diary all week, my eyes being bad. R. has many troubles: part of the piano arrangement of Götterdämmerung arrives and is unplayable and unintelligible, the middle voices too prominent, so that the main theme is obscured. He cannot find time for his score, which worries him a lot. “What I should like to do is to keep on producing, to get to be doing. No school, no stage, no one to help me. There I stand and still have to spend long years working on my past creations to put them in proper order.” Herr Schott sends the 10,000 florins, and R. reflects on the overtures: “Lohengrin's Journey,” “Tristan,” “Epilogue to Romeo and Juliet,” “Brünnhilde,” “Wieland the Smith.” Unfortunately R. still has troubles with the house, which I cannot take over for him, and his mood has a very depressing effect on me. I am like someone coming down with an illness: hindered, but not really ill. My eye ailment is also an obstacle. R. is very kind, always reading to me in the evening, Gibbon. The present time seems to us likewise a time of decay, in which great individuals perform great deeds which, however, have no real meaning. R. deplores the fact that through the introduction of Latin the peasants were suddenly cut off from all culture; that had not been the case previously. Brandt writes that it will probably not be possible to put on the performances before '76, which is probably a good thing. If only R. does not overexert and exhaust himself! This fear will not leave my heart. Recently Siegfried caused me sorrow for the first time. He went to his father, looked at the library, and said, “This will one day belong to me; when I am big, you will be dead then.” The mayor recently touched R. greatly by the way he said, “An undertaking like this must be brought to completion; a deed so selfless as this of R.'s must receive recognition; for R. has no need of fame and does not need his name and his works spread around, etc.” The barber says that a play was produced in Passau entitled Wagner's Dream, in which all the characters R. had created came to greet him. Bechstein is sending us a new grand piano, the old one is sent away, and the Érard is again installed in our house. For me a host of memories come flying back.
February 17, 1874	237	Eva’s birthday is marked with affectionate rituals and a renewed awareness of the intensity binding R. and her together. Amid the children’s excitement and R.’s ongoing corrections, the evening turns reflective as he links the Nibelungen poet to wandering genius and to the fragile survival of great art through print.	Monday, February 17: Eva's birthday. Today, too, she is greeted with the master melody to which she was born. I remind R. how at her birth he whispered in my ear, “I have never loved before.” He replies, “Whoever loves you has never loved before.” Recently, when after a day of vexations for R. we fell into each other's arms, he said to me in the evening, “I understand now how one can die for love; I believe the full power of love is felt only when one is my age. Today, when I was holding you, I was close to losing consciousness.” I cannot tell him how much I love him, and I suffer in consequence; in this case one must just act, for one cannot describe one's state of being to another. The children are invited, running through the new house. R. is unfortunately still much weighed down by corrections. If only Richter were here! Read Gibbon in the evening. Before that R. reads me from Freytag's book a passage about the itinerant people, with whom he associates Luther. “The writer of the Nibelungenlied must certainly have been that sort of itinerant, a genius,” says R., “for the theme he sang about was utterly despised at that time, and it was especially hated by the clergy on account of its old heathen flavor. What would we know about Shakespeare, for example, but for the art of printing?”
February 18, 1874	308	The day is shadowed by worries at home, Wagner’s poor health, and renewed anxiety over the Bayreuth arrangements, all while gossip from Munich and attacks on his reputation stir his irritation. Amid the strain, he and his circle keep returning to books and judgments about theology, philosophy, and music, but the larger mood is one of frustration and vigilance.	Wednesday, February 18: Today R. told me his dream: how he had been in a theater box and it had suddenly seemed like a precipice; to his horror Minna had suddenly come in and, reproving him in a friendly way, helped him in his peril; as they tried to walk down the steps, a series of cows’ heads appeared, ever more and more, until he woke up. Much domestic trouble, a wretched governess; on top of that, R. is not well - he cannot work. He spent the morning reading Daumer’s new book attacking the Old Catholics, Strauss supporters, etc., a defense of miracles. We thought we might find something profound in it, but found ineptitude; in his polemics against the others he is quite right, but in positive matters he is very superficial, even childish. On all these subjects Schopenhauer alone is profound and acute. The new copyist, the Macedonian, visits me and tells me what disgraceful opinions about R. prevail in the Munich Conservatoire; he also tells me about Brahms, how this gentleman at first spoke against the propagation of W.’s music, but when he saw that the young musician was a Wagnerian, he simply observed that this music was too difficult for young people! I am foolish enough to talk to R. about this, and it brings him back to the subject of the decoration. He wonders how he can make his opinion about this known. Friend Feustel writes from Munich that there are no difficulties in the way of the guarantee - only that another formulation is being demanded. Worries that maybe there will be an insistence on keeping to the year ’75, or, after the performances, some hold over the works. In this case, R. says, he must do everything to ensure that not a cent is paid out of the King’s purse!
February 19, 1874	116	Wagner remains restless through the night, preoccupied with the decoration dispute and the guarantee’s terms, though the Women’s Wagner Society offers a welcome contribution. The household stays calm on the surface, with reading, a Beethoven piece for the newspaper, and a lively retelling of William Tell providing brief relief from the underlying tension.	Thursday, February 19: R. had a bad night, constantly thinking about the decoration affair, then the dangers of the guarantee. He reads Daumer, but in the evening Gibbon to me. The Women’s Wagner Society sends 550 florins as the first proceeds of their lottery. Apart from that, nothing of significance. R. tells me that for Winkler’s newspaper he signed his short story about Beethoven “Richard Wagner, music setter in Paris.” R. tells Loldi the story of William Tell, and in connection with this we admire the way Schiller handles the main scene, making Bertha and Rudenz burst in on Gessler; Tell literally disappears, as if defeated, and suddenly one hears that the apple has been struck.
February 20, 1874	134	The morning opens with an absurdly uneasy dream, and the day carries that uneasy air into the practical business of ice skating with the children and a difficult conference with Feustel. Progress on the festival looks increasingly compromised by the king’s limited support, the need to revise plans, and a general sense of disappointment among the committee.	Friday, February 20: R. dreamed of the Brockhauses, that they behaved in a pitiably embarrassed way when we visited them in Leipzig! Went on the ice with the children; R. in the afternoon to Feustel’s, for the conference. The King does not wish to give a guarantee, but will advance money up to a limit of 100,000 thalers; until this money is refunded, the stage decorations, etc., etc., will belong to him. R. returned from the conference in an ill humor; the committee was downhearted, because of the impossibility of keeping to the original year, and Feustel once more talked of concerts. Feustel remarked that Düfflipp had been in a very bad mood. In short, nothing good, and especially no joy. In the evening Gibbon. (On our site they have at last struck water.)
February 21, 1874	85	Her failing eyesight and the doctor’s uncertainty cast a heavy pall over the day, and even talk of Lourdes suggests how little comfort she can find in practical remedies. Still, the household keeps moving, with house matters, Feustel’s travel, news of illness and public affairs, and a useful donation from Heintze offering scattered signs of support.	Saturday, February 21: Bad eyes, which refuse to function any longer. The doctor does not know what to do. We think of the water at Lourdes, of which R. has read much in Daumer’s book! Busy with the house; R. again to Feustel, who is going to Vienna. Hoffmann, the painter, is ill. Fine speech by Count Moltke about the extraordinary exertions the French are making in connection with their army. The piano teacher Heintze sends 100 thalers for our undertaking. In the evening Gibbon.
February 22, 1874	73	She writes to the king and sends family photographs, a gesture that keeps political and personal loyalties closely intertwined. Meanwhile Wagner finally settles into his score, and the evening turns intellectual as they read Nietzsche and find his opening too abstract to satisfy them.	Sunday, February 22: I write to the King and send him photographs of ourselves and the children. R. gets down at last to his score. In the morning he reads a book by a headmaster in Danzig about Gallicisms in the German language, which pleases him. In the evening we read Nietzsche’s recently arrived book on the uses of history; it starts off in a very abstract way and consequently seems somewhat arbitrary.
February 23, 1874	57	The day feels quieter and more inward, marked by her old-fashioned green eyeshade and Wagner’s productive work. Their reading of a friend’s book brings real enthusiasm, especially for its sharpness and courage, and it leads them to dismiss the modern world as shallow by comparison.	Monday, February 23: Armed with a green eyeshade, as in my childhood, I am still able to work a little, but R. is working busily. We continue with our friend’s book and delight in it - great courage, great fervor, very acute judgment. R.’s example has opened his eyes to the triviality of the whole modern world.
February 24, 1874	35	Her eye trouble still leaves her nearly immobilized, and the house’s slow progress only reinforces the sense of suspension. With little news from outside, the evening is devoted to finishing the book they have been absorbed in, which continues to hold their interest.	Tuesday, February 24: For me still no activity possible; my eyes are very painful. No news from the outside world; the house is making slow progress. In the evening finished the book with great interest.
February 25, 1874	76	Conversation centers on the friend’s treatise, whose brilliance and energy impress them, while Wagner keeps working and the household continues its routines. A visit from the dean adds warmth and originality to the day, though his remarks about the religious struggle give the visit a sharper political edge.	Wednesday, February 25: Our friend’s treatise forms the topic of our conversation; the fiery wit with which it is written is quite astonishing. R. works. In the afternoon we go to the house, and in the evening the dean visits us, delighting us with his warmth and his originality. He speaks of the awful turn the religious question has taken through the fact that Rome seems conciliatory; if peace is proclaimed, they will be the victors.
February 26, 1874	222	A note from the emperor strengthens their sense that Prussia remains firm, even as the dean’s earlier view is shown to have been mistaken. Wagner works steadily, buoyed by donations and by the Nibelungen images in their hall, while the evening’s reading and discussion move between comic court anecdotes and reflections on cultural greatness.	Thursday, February 26: The Emperor’s note shows our good dean to have been wrong; the mood in Prussia seems very determined. R. works. From Hamburg he has received 60 thalers as the result of a concert given for the benefit of Bayreuth by the military band in Hamburg. Still very touching proofs of interest. Delight in the pictures based on the Nibelungenring, which have been affixed in the hall of our house. R. is delighted for Fidi’s sake; I tell him I wish he, R., had had such things done for him. Fidi’s constant high spirits please him. “That is life’s flowering; it is how the Will shows pleasure; this is what drives it to produce childhood.” In the evening we read the introduction to the book on Gallicisms; Frederick the Great speaking of M. Ouafiiz amuses us very much, although his deep insight exalts us at the same time. “How terrible, how sad,” says R., “that such a being shows characteristics which are downright grotesque, and which turn him merely into a subject for anecdotes!” “Latin was to Charlemagne what French was to Frederick.” Praising our Emperor, R. says: “It is only as a man of culture that he shows up badly, that is to say, only when he comes into contact with our culture. Otherwise he is truly a hero.”
February 27, 1874	661	Wagner divides his time between productive labor and practical attention to the house, which seems to give him genuine satisfaction. Their conversations about Fidi’s cheerfulness, poetic growth, tempo, and German language reveal a household that keeps turning daily details into larger reflections on character, art, and discipline. The day closes with a mix of amusement, intimacy, and lingering concern about contracts, performances, and the demands of serious work.	Friday, February 27: R. is still at work, but he also does a lot in connection with the house, which gives him pleasure. Fidi’s constant cheerfulness gives him much joy: “There is no ugly vanity, no arrogance, no wickedness in the wake of cheerfulness. Those qualities belong to melancholy, to lack of freedom.” “He will reap the harvest,” he says, looking at the house. “I am glad: he will have no longings for wealth and fine living and will be able to despise all outward things.” Today, when I pose a riddle to the children - “When I bring it about, I bring it about, but if not, it happens just the same” - Fidi guessed “an accident,” which did rather amaze us. In the evening Gibbon. Saturday, February 28: R. is still busily at work. Friend Feustel is working out a contract with Professor Hoffmann, who expects to have his work completed by 1875; but there can be no question of that. In the morning I walk to the house with the children; in the afternoon R. works. In the evening he reads to me some of the Gallicisms, which make one wonder what will become of the German language. Also read Gibbon. Over coffee we once more talked about the Nibelungenlied, and R. said, “A poet literally grows with his task as Shakespeare did in Antony and Cleopatra; in the beginning he is just compiling, but then he sees more and more of the tragedy in it.” Incidentally, the dean recently pleased us greatly - when he was talking about rare impressions which he had had and which made an immediate impact on him, whether in music, painting, or literature, by quoting the scene in which the wounded Antony has himself carried up to Cleopatra. “This shows,” R. says to me, “what repressed fires and emotions lie concealed in our friend.” Sunday, March 1: R. tells me two dreams he had last night; in one, in alarm, “My God, have I given you any money?” She, in a friendly manner: “So you think of that now!” Then a cordial parting, he, however, saying to himself, “You will be able to tell her better in writing that we cannot go on living together.” The second dream was set in Paris, in the foyer of the Grand Opera, where R. was to produce and conduct one of his works, and he was received scornfully by the members of the orchestra. One of them: “I suppose you think you write pretty things and will please the audience.” “I suppose you want to perform your work here!” R. seeks to pacify them by saying he has never tortured an orchestra, but they will not listen. When it is time to begin the rehearsals, he loses his hat and looks for it, and amid mocking laughter the members of the orchestra bring him all kinds of children’s hats - then he woke up. I go to church; the hymn O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden, followed unfortunately by the sermon. R. works. At lunch the Macedonian, to whom R. addresses some remarks on tempo. “Of course,” R. says, “one must have some idea of it; one must know, having heard it done well and then badly, that they are not the same thing.” In this regard the metronome is of no use. [An untranslatable witticism omitted?] When the stranger has departed and R. and I embrace, he says to me, “You are unfadingly beautiful!” In the morning he told me that Minna had once threatened to publish her memoirs, which makes me laugh a lot. When he is talking about tempo, he again tells how Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient had come to a rehearsal of Guillaume Tell and asked him please not to take the Tyrolienne so fast. “She could not bear slapdash work,” says R. In the evening we intend to put the etchings in order, but we do not succeed, and return to Gibbon.
No diary entries found.