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 1879 (15 total)

Date	Word Count	Subject	Content
February 1, 1879	389	Wagner moves from pencil to ink and jokes that his latest canon will be surprising, while also turning sharp phrases about taxation and destiny. The evening is devoted to Bach, whom he treats as a kind of musical revelation, and he emphasizes how these works seem written from necessity rather than for public approval.	Saturday, February 1: R. has slept well; he goes downstairs to work in ink while I arrange the “meadow” in his room upstairs. It turns out looking very Klingsor-ish, but that amuses him; he says, “Things are going so well for me - but that is because my previous life was so abominable.” Lunch with the W.’s and friend Rubinstein, discussion of the state of affairs in France and Germany (R. says Bismarck’s name comes from “every bite [Bissen] a mark”!). After lunch R. reads the Bayreuther Blätter with great enjoyment, then he talks about Das Liebesverbot and says he is surprised how bad it is: “What phases one goes through! It is hard to believe it is the same person.” He takes out [Rossini’s] Otello, the music in the second act as Rodrigo goes off and the following, plaintive aria of Desdemona, and talks of the impression it made on him, whereas Euryanthe always seemed stiff and false in spite of its heavenly music. Frau Schröder-Devrient always had to content herself with these Italian things, since she could make nothing of such Marschner nonsenses as “Leave me the veil, I beg.” “Above all,” R. exclaims, “you need a good play, and the important thing is what one puts into a good play or takes from it; but that is the basis, and I always knew it - that’s why I could never understand Euryanthe.” In the afternoon he reads the Bayreuther Blätter and is very pleased with W.’s article, “In the Coming Year.” “He is truly my expert,” he says, and wishes he had a musician like that, too. Memories of concerts. Then R. says, “Nothing is so dear to me as the room in which I bide, for opposite, my fairest wife dwells there by my side.” In the evening R. and I are alone, and as usual we then get immersed in our memories - “but nothing compared with their contentment.” We remember how we wept over Minna von Barnhelm at Tribschen and think with pleasure of all the many things we have achieved in these 14 years - Meistersinger, Nibelungen, the marches, the collected writings, Parsifal, the house, the theater, the biography. R. reads to me two legends by Keller, the “Dance Legend” and “Virgin and Nun,” very pretty; but above all we like the short preface the author wrote for the book.
February 2, 1879	320	On Candlemas he works, reflects on life and death in a playful exchange, and spends time with Bach’s preludes and fugues. He draws distinctions between older and newer music, returns to childhood memories of singing fugue-like lines, and enjoys the bright winter sun enough to go out twice.	Sunday, February 2: R. had a good night, and he works (from pencil to ink), he says his canon will surprise me. At breakfast he suddenly calls Bismarck the great tax collector, since he is trying to put taxes on everything. After lunch we are amused by the sudden idea of calling R.’s previous life, in memory of G. Keller, the Faldtsche, which consists in nothing but detritus. Before that R. said to me, “You are right, the King does belong to us; he has caused us a lot of trouble, but from the point of view of Fate, he does belong to us.” The same thought I encountered again, in his Braunes Buch, which I glanced through during the decorating, and where it is written down! Yesterday, when many thoughts, both large and small, were going through my head, they found their expression as we parted after lunch in “Laughing death!” “Not at all,” said R., “weeping life!,” and today he asks me what I had in fact meant by it: did I wish to die?! In the evening some more of the Preludes and Fugues, five of them today; the 4th (no. 12 in the second book) R. calls a complete transition to more modern music. He says Bach must have played it to his wife. Previously he had emphasized the extent to which these works were written by their composers for themselves, and how superficial the works their successors wrote for other people seemed in comparison - the sonatas. “They have also given us some good things, of course, but this is like birth itself.” He then goes on to point out the difference between Bach and the Italian composers of the same period, talks of a figured “Kyrie eleison” and tells us how as children he and his sisters imagined they were singing fugues when they sang these figurations to themselves. Candlemas brought us glorious sunshine, and R. went out twice today.
February 3, 1879	582	He and R. spend the day in intense conversation about Parsifal, especially its emotional restraint, the recognition of Kundry, and the meaning of the cello and timpani passages. Later the mood turns scholarly and critical, with reflections on antiquity, a new Hermes head from Olympia, and a sharp dismissal of Brahms that sends them back to Plutarch for relief.	Monday, February 3: R. complains that for him the latter part of the night, from 4 o’clock onward, is always bad. But he works and says to me, “Do not expect too much from the meadow — it must of course be short, and it cannot express delight in nonexistence, as in Tristan.” Then he laughs and says, “Rubinstein will ask, ‘How does it happen that Parsifal recognizes Kundry?’ — if indeed he does recognize her.” And he continues: “It is all unspoken ecstasy, as Parsifal returns home and gazes upon this poor woman.” Oh, if I could only reproduce the expression on his face and the sound of his voice as he describes the state of Parsifal’s soul! Then he tells me once more something I forgot to note down on Saturday: when he was walking beside the pond he heard a curious horn sounding, very absurd, and it was probably blown by the watchman on the ice; everyone vanished from the pond and he continued his walk alone; suddenly he saw on the snow the very faint shadow of himself and the two dogs, and, glancing up at the sky, he saw the moon in its first quarter. It had been a very mysterious moment; probably as a child he would have laughed heartily at the horn, but nobody had laughed. When we part I say, “You divine man!” and he replies, “No, you,” then adds, “Unspoken ecstasy!” Ah, yes, that exists between us! ... A wonderful head of Hermes from the new excavations at Olympia (illustrated in the I. Z.) gives R. another opportunity to talk about the ancient world, and he says, “How pitiful we look in comparison — like barbarians!” R. goes out, is pleased with his room, which I help to arrange, calls it his shaman, and then goes down to his work. But suddenly he is upstairs with me again: “I shouted to the children from the hall, asking them to call you, but nobody heard; I have come upstairs to tell you that the entry of the kettledrum in G is the finest thing I have ever done!” I accompany him downstairs and he plays to me the anointing of Parsifal by Gurnemanz, with its wonderful canon, and the baptism of Kundry with the annihilating sound of the kettledrum: “Obliteration of the whole being, of all earthly desire,” says R. In the evening we come back to a declaration by Herr R. which yesterday astonished us — that on his first encounter with them, when he was a student at the Vienna Conservatoire, Tannhäuser and Lohengrin made no impression on him at all! It is intellect which has brought this poor man to his feeling for these works.... Later R. discusses with me the inner loneliness of such a piteous character, and says this makes Rubinstein interesting in his eyes; he has found his way back to him in spite of the gulf which divides one from such a person. At the end of the conversation R. says to him gently, “We are trying to explain a phenomenon to ourselves; it is not dislike but liking that sets us on this path.” And he concludes jokingly, “You’ll probably take that again as an affront.” We then go on to a Brahms symphony, which R. plays as a piano duet with Herr Rubinstein, and which again downright disgusts us. R. talks indignantly about its vulgarity, and we then seek salvation in the final pages of Plutarch’s essay on garrulity.
February 4, 1879	434	R. wakes feeling physically fragile and describes himself as glass-like, then recounts a dream in which he is absurdly expected to sing Max on stage while conducting in Dresden. The day moves from Beethoven and his dislike of pathos to garden walks, a new symphonic theme, and an evening chamber performance that is appreciated but not stirring.	Tuesday, February 4: “I have been awake since five o’clock,” R. says, “and I feel as if I were made of glass: I am quite conscious of all the functions going on in my body, though they are supposed to be working involuntarily.” He dreamed that he was again engaged in Dresden as a conductor and had undertaken in his contract to sing as well; he was expected to sing Max in Der Freischütz, and was indignant about this absurd clause in his contract: “Get Herr von Lüttichau to do it, I can’t sing a note.” Then he woke up. (Recently he told me of frequently recurring dreams in which he travels through Asia, finding Turkestan very different from what he supposed; he has also gone wandering through Africa.) Then yesterday’s pitiful impression leads us to Beethoven’s symphonies, and R. remarks on Beethoven’s splendid instinct in avoiding all plaintiveness or other forms of excess; he departed from his usual rule only in the Ninth and in the first movement of the C Minor, full of defiance, but this is something quite different; these works depict Nature before the emergence of human life, he says: everything was struggle and destruction at that time, too, but in a different way. “I hate pathos,” he exclaims. “People will be amazed, when I publish my symphonies, to see how simple they are, though they have already had examples of that in the marches and the Idyll.” He tells me how Weinlig advised him against dissonances, saying they would either sound ugly or not be heard. “I shouldn’t have minded the ugliness so much perhaps,” says R., “but not being heard that annoyed me.” After lunch I stroll around in the garden, R. comes to fetch me, and I go with him into the palace gardens, where Marke’s curious way of chattering his teeth amuses him: “No doubt he thinks he’s talking!” I: “He sees us moving our jaws like that and does the same!” (This is what gave R. his dream a little while ago of Marke as an Italian chorus singer.) R. walks on farther; he does not care for the thaw, preferring the cold. On his return home he talks of a pretty theme for a symphony which he has downstairs: “It will all be done, the symphonies as well.” We part with thousandfold greetings and blessings. In the evening the string quartet from Munich; at R.’s request they play Sgambati’s quintet together with Herr R.; it still pleases us very much, but it seems somewhat long and is the kind of music which does not raise one’s spirits.
February 5, 1879	401	The diarist falls ill for several days, while R. keeps watch with devoted care, reading Plutarch and his own letter to the king. As the writer recovers, the days are marked by partial work, an unsatisfying run-through of Parsifal, a new dress called Scheherazade, a difficult ball, and continued pleasure in Plutarch’s ancient dialogues.	Wednesday, February 5: I have not written in my book. I felt unwell during the night of the 5th to the 6th and had to stay in bed for three days, till Sunday. R. kept a loyal watch beside me, full of divine love, read to me Plutarch’s glorious discussion of Socrates’s guardian spirit and also his own still more beautiful letter to the King about Fidi. In the meantime he fully completes the meadow. On Monday the 10th I again ate downstairs. In the evening we went through Euryanthe (Scene 1), which, R. says, does not give him as much pleasure as he expected, too much glee-club music in the choruses. “That is a master stroke,” he says of the place where Lysiart enters treacherously, “but still so little awareness.” Then R. thinks of the finale to the first act of Il Barbiere (“All this tumult and confusion”), and we all delight in it. R. worked on Tuesday, too. In the evening we went through the first act of Parsifal, but it gives R. no pleasure, since Herr R. does not get the accents or the tempi right. Arrival of “Scheherazade,” the new dress which R. has given me and which I put on! Wednesday the 12th was a wretched day; R. has a cold, and I accompanied Lusch to a ball. Though I remained there only two hours, I still found it depressing! Thursday the 13th, R. had a good night, is well, and goes to his work; in the evening he reads to me the strange, original, and profound conversation between Circe and Odysseus (Plutarch). Friday the 14th, R. not well, speaks angrily about Lusch’s long stay at the ball (I had asked a friend to take care of her), feels indisposed and spends the day in bed; in the evening I read to him Gogol’s Hetman, that is to say, a scene from it which he wanted to tell me about after reading it himself and finding it very remarkable: it is the scene in which the new hetman is elected and the maddest confusion leads to a declaration of war. Saturday the 15th, R. well, returns to his work, tells me at lunch that I must write some words for him — he already has the melody, which conveys the sense of the matter, but the words are lacking. In the evening we read the discussion about the guardian spirit again, with genuine delight.
February 16, 1879	325	R. has a restless night filled with money dreams and a sense of aging, and the writer wakes alarmed by the fear of losing him. Their conversation returns to childhood fears and then to Plutarch and Greek culture, with admiration for the endurance of antiquity contrasted against the Germans' smallness; concern lingers when R. shows a little blood in his saliva.	Sunday, February 16: R. had a bad night, disturbed by ugly dreams about money. I myself wandered with him in a dream along a wooded walk and felt a painful start when he said to me that he was beginning to feel old. Waking up, I said to him, “Please don’t leave me just now — I have had such a bad dream.” He: “But I am just coming back!” He had also experienced some fear of ghosts downstairs. At lunch we laughed about it, and R. talked of his terrors as a child, which had never been of ghosts, but of lifeless objects suddenly coming to life: “I should have been frightened of this siphon — of a chair — of anything.” In the evening we finish Plutarch’s discussion for the benefit of our friends. Yesterday R. prefaced our reading by saying: “I have read Balzac — good — and Keller — good — and Gogol — good — and Turgenev — good — but what barbarians we are! It was only the ancient world which brought forth truly great men; in comparison, all that is really effective is Christ and the Sermon on the Mount, the denial of the world; in the acceptance of the world only the Greeks are great.” Astonishment at the long lifespan of the Greek spirit: 600 years later Plutarch still speaking as if he were living at the same time as Socrates — and how do we regard Wolfram von Eschenbach? Delight in the comparison with the mirror, though otherwise “The Cave of Trophonios” proves somewhat wearisome. R. looks at his old edition of Plutarch, “transferred with incredible effort” into German, and speaks of the timid and petty character of the Germans at that time. My spirits are overshadowed by learning that R., who went out this afternoon but gave it up on account of the violent wind, showed some blood in his saliva, not from the lungs, the doctor says.
February 17, 1879	461	The day begins with relief over a better night and a touching toast for Eva’s birthday, and R. is pleased to realize he finally has enough words for a musical passage. He reflects on Greek myth, Archimedes’ absorbed labor, and the beauty of Fidi, then ends by joking with the children and joining a lively card game.	Monday, February 17: R. had a good night — at any rate he had to get up only once. Eva’s birthday; when we, R. and I, drink a toast, he says, “What we are drinking to is so touching that we cannot even mention it.” And, as always, “Things are better than they were.” Then R. joyfully informs me that he has words enough — he had overlooked one verse (“der Hess sie so gedeihen”). He takes pride in not having had to alter his words: yesterday he recalled the melody of the “Prize Song,” which came to him before the words, and was pleased with it; today he recalls Sachs’s last speech and asks if any other composer could have done it better, as far as voice leading is concerned. Referring to what he is doing now, he says he is taking care not to put in too many figurations — something he has sometimes done, as when Brünnhilde pleads to Wotan in Siegmund’s behalf; I remark that this was just because Frau Materna did not have the personality to act it — she was overshadowed by the music, as it were. Recently he spoke of his absent-mindedness, the way his head is always full of his work, and he mentioned the example of Archimedes, whom the servants had to remove bodily from his work in order to bathe and anoint him, and how he continued to draw figures on his leg with the ointment; in the same way, he himself was constantly making notes on scraps of paper. When we were talking about the dialogue between Odysseus and Circe, R. said that the fine thing about the Greeks was the way all these sagas continued to live in their thoughts; with us nothing now remains alive, and to this extent Keller’s experiment with legends is interesting and as it were folklike. Delight in Fidi, whom R. always finds so beautiful when he compares him with other boys — as if from a different world. (Fidi brought me the first flowers of the year; on the very day of Eva’s birth — she herself one of life’s blossoms!) R. goes out for a while and drops in at Angermann’s, where he causes ringing laughter by telling the barmaid, who is leaving, that she ought to offer her services to the theater committee in behalf of the ballet! (A committee to promote the theater has been formed here.) In the evening the three younger children gather around a little table to play cards; they make a very amusing picture, and R. says, “Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger, and Siegfried — I myself am Götterdämmerung!” Then: “The three lansquenets.” It gives him the urge to play, too, and with Miss Murchison we make up a whist table with “bids”! ...
February 18, 1879	264	R. is in good spirits and presents a transition in Parsifal that he considers especially fitting and free of any jolt. He speaks confidently about the vastness of his own music, then goes out briefly despite the snow, before the evening brings a satisfying rehearsal of the first act of Die Meistersinger that leaves him bitter about how the work has been treated.	Tuesday, February 18: R. had to get up once during the night, but he does not feel unwell in the morning and we chat merrily at breakfast. Toward noon he comes to me and says, “I have found a transition which is worthy of you,” leads me into his room and plays to me this divine transition from “mit ihr Gebet ihm weihen” to “ihn selbst am Kreuze.” “The main thing,” R. says, “is that it doesn’t cause a shock — there must be no feeling of shock.” This morning he said he would like to compare his works with those of other composers and see whether his do not contain ten times as much music — something which has never been acknowledged. And for this reason he was willing to believe that his works would have a great future. He is so well and cheerful that today seems like a really sunny day: “I am so happy,” he says, “I feel like a god.” When we go upstairs together and I notice that he has ordered all sorts of things for himself, he admonishes me jokingly: “Always the attitude of Rome toward Venice — permitting nothing, but overlooking faults once committed!” I have to love him like a child or like a god! ... Snow flurries, but he goes out for a while with Brange, who, having run after him, touches him by demanding to return to her newborn puppies. In the evening we go through the first act of Die Meistersinger with much enjoyment; but R.’s delight turns to bitterness over the treatment this work has received.
February 19, 1879	185	After a brief nighttime wakefulness, R. spends the day cheerful, working, walking, and talking about subjects ranging from the aristocracy to language. The evening turns sociable with cards and champagne, and he reacts with surprise to the international success of the Tang while also crediting Schopenhauer with revealing Christianity to him.	Wednesday, February 19: R. was up during the night from 3 to 4 o’clock, but otherwise he is feeling well; he slept peacefully before and after, and our morning conversation covered all sorts of subjects — the aristocracy, who have lost everything except their vanity, the German language, and many other things. Yesterday, when the filling in of the spring in Teplitz was mentioned, R. said, “For Teplitz that is as much of a loss as if Schnappauf were to leave Bayreuth!” He works and is in cheerful spirits; he also goes for a short walk; in the evening whist with bids again, and after it champagne! ... (News of the success of the Tang everywhere; R. says, “Who would have thought such a thing 20 years ago, or considered it possible?”) When I tell R. that I happened to glance through the Theologia Germanica and am truly amazed that Schopenhauer discerned its deep metaphysical basis through its language of naive faith, he says, “Yes, it was Schopenhauer who revealed Christianity to me.” (Much enjoyment from the children who are developing a strange talent for mimicry.)
February 20, 1879	215	R. brushes off a poor night with wit and spends the day satisfied with his work, then helps refine a friend’s article on Siegfried. A Bach performance leaves him meditating on music as a natural, endless language, and he contrasts his own rule-bound habits with Bach’s freedom; a kind letter from the King closes the day warmly.	Thursday, February 20: “If from night’s cares you seek your ease, drink champagne and eat some cheese,” R. answers me when I ask him what sort of a night he had, the reason being that I have often asked him not to eat cheese in the evening. He works and is satisfied with what he has done. In the afternoon he goes out for a while and then reads friend W.’s article on Siegfried, his object being to help him cultivate a simpler and more correct literary style. In the evening three Bach preludes and fugues from the second book, very well played by Herr R. Of the first and most beautiful (in F-sharp minor, No. 14) R. says, “That is like Nature, incomprehending and incomprehensible, and it is also unending melody!” He then continues: “That was his language. In life he could expect nothing but trouble and vexation, and probably he never spoke a witty word, but in his music he let himself go.” Talking about himself, he says he is still very pedantic and thinks hard before writing fifths, etc., but when he needs to, he throws the rule book out of the window; Bach did the same, and that is why R.’s teacher Weinlig never really liked him. (Very nice letter to R. from the King.)
February 21, 1879	124	R. wakes well and soon reveals that he has found a passage he has been seeking, singing the Gurnemanz words with evident joy. The happiness is shadowed by memories of difficult times in Vienna and by the writer’s own earache and toothache, which complicate her wish to travel and leave the evening subdued.	Friday, February 21: R. had a good night, and around noon I see him radiating happiness — he has found it, he says, and he sings me Gurnemanz’s words. He is taking a long time over it, he adds, and that gives him pleasure. After lunch he talked about the bad times in Vienna and said, “Nothing of all that was really necessary.” He recalled how he had always been forced to break off his work — Tannhäuser, for example, and others. My wish to give him my picture for his birthday coincides with earache and toothache; I ask to be allowed to go to Munich. He wants to come, too; my anxiety about his health does not permit it. A sad evening — disconsolate mood —
February 22, 1879	153	The writer goes away on a night journey and returns by surprise a few days later, grateful that R. did not pursue her or meet her at the station. The exchange of telegrams, dreams of illness, affection from the children, and her rereading of R.’s earliest letters to Schumann all leave her weighing whether the trip was worth the strain.	Saturday, February 22: Journey! No diary until Tuesday, the 25th, when my return takes R. by surprise; I traveled in the night. Glad that he did not fetch me from the station or travel after me. (For all else, see his letters, telegrams.) Enclosed between the pages are ten telegrams addressed to Cosima, giving news, entirely domestic, of Wagner and the children during her absence, and signed variously by Wagner, Wolzogen, Rubinstein, and the servant Georg. R. was not entirely well; he had bad dreams about me, and he did not come to join me because he also dreamed all the children were ill. Was I wrong to inflict all this on us just to bring him pleasure? A difficult question! May the heavens protect us! The children were very affectionate! I give R. the letters to read which he wrote to Schumann in earliest times; Herr Levi was kind enough to have them copied for me.
February 26, 1879	130	R. had a somewhat improved night, and the writer is deeply moved by hearing him resume musical ideas, as if life had opened again. The day includes a teasingly social interruption from Frau Jager, a report of imperial plans for a future performance cycle, and a quiet end with a card game and a private moment together.	Wednesday, February 26: R. had a better night, though not entirely a good one. I feel as if the heavens have reopened when I hear his sounds, the only music in the world for me! R. laughs and says he does not know what to make of it: when I went away, music abandoned him entirely, but now he has his head full of themes again! In the evening we are unfortunately not alone. Frau Jager brings us some news from Vienna: the Emperor has commanded a performance of the whole cycle for as early as next March. Amusing, on the other hand, is the episode between A. Rubinstein and Herr v. Hülsen. We take refuge in whist. After that, however, R. and I are alone together for a while. (The “swan”!)
February 27, 1879	116	R. rests better, works after breakfast, and reads Gogol before starting his day. He is gloomy about the absence of close relationships, and the conversation turns to spiritualism and philosophy, which he treats as familiar modern questions already illuminated by Schopenhauer.	Thursday, February 27: R. had a tolerable night. We breakfast “like an eagle with two heads,” and he then goes to his work. His reading matter before starting work is Gogol's short stories. Yesterday evening he wrote to Herr Levi to thank him for his kindness to me. Arrival of a pamphlet by Herr Marr, The Victory of Judaism, containing views which are, alas, very close to R.'s. R., who went out today as well, is in a very melancholy mood: “This lack of relationships!” he exclaims. When I tell him about Prof. Zöllner and the spiritualist medium Slade, he says this is the modern, realistic way of approaching a subject, which Schopenhauer has already so beautifully explained.
February 28, 1879	335	R. has a rough night and the pair exchange playful, affectionate jabs about her absence and his suffering. Despite the fatigue, he works, demonstrates musical ideas, and the evening passes in recollections, fugues, and spirited comparisons between Bach, Handel, and other composers.	Friday, February 28: Again R. did not have a good night. He got up twice, and I also woke him from a frightening dream. He jokes that for this my absence was to blame, and says laughingly, “Since the corn was beaten down, it rose no more: that was its death.” When I reproach him for his cruelty, he replies, “You ought to be pleased to have my life and death in your hands - Richardism has been completely merged into Cosmaism.” In spite of his wretched night he works and plays to me a transition, from the meadow to Kundry's flower theme. Over coffee he recalls that it will be a week tomorrow since I went away, and he says this two-day absence was like an unending Russian steppe in his life. Returning home after going out, I ask the servant if his master is well and where he is; immediately a sound comes from his room, telling me he is there! He comes to bid me good evening, and when I ask him what he has in his hand he says, “My paper from Seville.” He goes down again to the salon, where I hear him continuing with his work. In the evening reminiscences of friend Serov, whom Herr R. also knew. Herr Rub. tells us that six weeks before his death the Grand Duchess Helene got from him the admission that he was un homme d'esprit [“a wit”]. Then four of the 48 Preludes and Fugues, from No. 17 of the second book on; R. often sings to himself the theme of the 17th fugue, and he likes it to be played lightheartedly, like a rondo. The following one, in G-flat minor, is, I believe, even more beautiful, a truly wonderful wonder! R. says one only has to compare them with what others understood by fugues, for example, Handel in the Overture to The Messiah; since we do not have this work we look at Samson, and R. says the allegro theme denotes the Philistines.
No diary entries found.