The Brown Book

Diary Entry of August 17, 1865

Overview

Wagner resumes work on the Siegfried score and reflects on the suffering and calculated malice depicted in the Ramayana. A letter from Cosima renews his distress at separation, although his return to composition gives him encouragement.

Content

Thursday, August 17:

Good morning! Slept beautifully. — Today there shall at last be a return to the Siegfried score. Maybe I shall have a letter too? —

Rama accompanies me. I was reading the Farewell, his final departure from the city. At this point everyone gives way to tears, sighs, cries, sobs, weeping, howling and wailing — it beats one how the houses stay standing — and I sought the authoress of this misery wondering how she begins to endure such success for her not ardently malicious but merely ambitious undertaking? Then I saw hunch-backed Marantha who had given the counsel, and imagined her gazing down on all the monstrous misery and saying to herself coldly: ‘Well, it will all pass, and soon at that. Then it will be as if it never was, and we shall be lords!” Ah, the malicious ones! They know more than the good-natured, only not everything: only the saints know that! —

Here’s a letter coming —

That was a sad letter! A real separation letter. To know now that you will meantime be in quite a different mood, and to have, through the letter, to see you like this today — those are the confusions of separation. This mix up of time and space is very harrowing — Yes, separation! —

Against that I have been doing a neat job on Siegfried: the spell is broken! —

Good night, dear wife!