The Brown Book

Richard Wagner’s diary between 1865 and 1882

The Brown Book is the notebook, bound in brown leather, that Wagner began on the Hochkopf above the Walchensee in August 1865 and wrote in, on and off, until 1882. Its first pages are a diary addressed to Cosima, who was then still married to Hans von Bülow and travelling in Hungary with her father; Wagner wrote in it what he could not say in letters. Later the book became a store for whatever he wanted to keep: poems, sketches for dramas, the Annals of his life, forewords and stray thoughts.

The Hochkopf and Munich, 1865. From 9 to 21 August 1865 Wagner lived alone with his servant Franz and his dog Pohl in King Ludwig II’s hunting lodge, ill, longing for Cosima and still shaken by the death of Ludwig Schnorr von Carolsfeld, his first Tristan. The daily entries run on through the autumn in Munich. Among them, written at the King’s request between 27 and 30 August, is the first prose sketch of Parzival, in which the whole drama is already laid out. The diary breaks off with the days at Hohenschwangau in November and Wagner’s expulsion from Munich in December.

Exile and Tribschen, 1866–1868. A few entries follow from Lyons, Marseilles and Geneva, and after a long silence a handful from Tribschen in 1867, written while Cosima was away in Munich. In February 1868 Wagner copied into the book his Annals, a terse record of every year from 1846, made from the notes he used when dictating his autobiography to Cosima. Through 1868 come the forewords to German Art and German Politics and the second edition of Opera and Drama, the recollections of Schnorr, thoughts on Buddhism for The Victors, ideas for a drama about Luther, satirical sonnets, and the Annals for 1868, the year Cosima came to Tribschen for good.

The later entries, 1869–1882. Once Cosima was keeping her own diaries, the Brown Book was used less and less. The later pages hold dedicatory poems to King Ludwig, notes for the Beethoven essay, the sketch for the farce A Capitulation, poems on the Franco-Prussian War, an epitaph for Karl Tausig and verses to Georg Herwegh. The last entries, written in Naples, Bayreuth and Palermo between 1880 and 1882, are notes on war, property, religion and race, and the book ends with the fragment “On Male and Female in Culture and Art”.

After Wagner’s death the book passed to Cosima and then to their daughter Eva, who pasted over or cut out the pages she judged too private. Most of these were recovered when the book was published in full in 1975, edited by Joachim Bergfeld; the text here follows George Bird’s English translation of 1980. Where the book gives a German poem with a translation, only the translation is shown.

Showing all entries (148 total)

Entry	Word Count	Subject
Undated	58	Wagner doubts that questions of property, treatment of animals, and sexual relationships can be settled by advance speculation. He expects their answers to emerge from action grounded in a profound religious awareness.
Undated	10	Wagner notes the possible recurrence of natural efficiency or instinct. He associates this recurrence with the roots of different peoples.
Undated	30	Wagner treats Ovid's mythological poetry as playful handling of religious allegory after religion has declined. He draws a parallel with Ariosto's use of medieval legends.
Undated	19	Wagner distinguishes metaphysical questions from the forms available for answering them. He considers allegory, shaped by natural human conception, the only possible mode of response.
Undated	24	Wagner imagines regeneration as requiring an immense moral effort. Its strength would need to match the physical upheaval he associates with humanity's degeneration.
Undated	24	Wagner questions aesthetic refinement built upon an immoral world, invoking the Renaissance. Images of beautiful predators give the brief note its pointed conclusion.
Undated	26	Wagner declares that humanity has forfeited its claim to be shown a path to salvation. He points to its present condition as the reason for that judgement.
Undated	35	Wagner argues that distrust of scientific honesty encourages fanciful amateur alternatives. Medicine provides his parenthetical example of this reaction.
Undated	4	Wagner defines prayer as a turning away from willing. The entire note condenses its function into this brief formula.
Undated	26	Wagner identifies God with an inward light cast upon the world. He understands that light as perception through sympathy.
Undated	33	Wagner compares contemporary expectations of destruction with Jesus' anticipation of the world's end. The fall of Rome supplies a historical analogy for forces that could undo the present order.
Undated	88	Wagner argues that property can underpin a moral society only if everyone participates in possessing it. He accuses prevailing state theories of disguising the exclusion produced by conquest.
Undated	13	Wagner records Schopenhauer's formulation that the other world has no location or time. He links the thought with the kingdom of God.
Undated	9	Wagner associates Hamlet with a condition of understanding without the ability to act. He extends that predicament to a collective sense of himself and his contemporaries.
Undated	10	Wagner links Sonata 111 with samsara and nirvana. He characterizes the latter through an abbreviated reference to affirmation.
Undated	70	Wagner examines two reasons for refusing to acknowledge decline: uncertainty about remedies and the slowness of the process. He argues that comparisons with Rome require attention to the differences between ancient and modern culture.
Undated	23	A brief note connects Schopenhauer and providence with the problem of inevitable decline. Wagner asks what value knowledge has when the decline it reveals can no longer be remedied.
Undated	84	Wagner questions why property acquired through force has come to be treated as sacred and inviolable. He attributes this to a habitual confusion between conquest and claims arising from cultivation.
Undated	37	Wagner warns that failure to prevent old abuses, including unequal possession, will force history to repeat its lessons. He imagines the renewed instruction arriving with greater severity.
Undated	114	Wagner questions the place of the Ten Commandments in Christian instruction when society continually circumvents them. He argues for a different catechism centred on love of one's neighbour, using hostile language about Judaism.
Undated	39	Wagner considers Christ even under the supposition of being a poetic ideal. He argues that this ideal remains unusually realizable through communion with bread and wine.
Undated	23	Wagner reduces a familiar form of criticism to questions about method and intended results. He observes that the demand is persistently practical, even when an ideal is at issue.
October 23, 1881	58	Wagner sets out a racial and gender speculation about mixture, decline, and the transfer of power from men to women. He then connects feminine redemption with art and the Christian image of the Virgin bearing the Saviour.
November–December 1881 (uncertain)	22	Writing in Palermo, Wagner suggests that the questions put to a genius reveal how strange that figure is to the surrounding world. The short note expresses contempt for the incomprehension he perceives in such questions.
January 26, 1882	107	Wagner contrasts early Christianity's expectation of civilization's destruction with attempts to improve society through law and government. He argues that recognizing an order founded on injustice calls for a new beginning rather than gradual repair.
Undated	38	Wagner quotes Renan's claim that medieval condemnation of usury obstructed civilization's progress. He dismisses that judgement as naive.
March 4, 1882	40	Wagner contrasts a moral approach to understanding the world with a physiological or mechanical one. He assigns the former to the poet and the latter to the scientist.
Tuesday, March 21 – Sunday, April 9, 1882	304	An unfinished essay treats male and female as divided aspects of a unity whose realization shapes both culture and art. Wagner connects affectionate marriage with human renewal and critically develops a discussion of Gobineau's racial ideas.
No entries found.

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