Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of February 29, 1872

Overview

Encouraging letters arrive from Berlin, Heidelberg, and Vienna about Bayreuth and local support for the cause, and I spend much of the day answering them. R. is working and feels somewhat better, and after lunch we talk about musical ideas and his old memory of Mendelssohn's joke in A Midsummer Night's Dream. Reading Schopenhauer leaves me convinced that his description of genius could have been written for R., which deepens my sense of gratitude and unworthiness toward him.

Content

Thursday, February 29:

Very good letter from an architect in Berlin, who wants to set up a student society for all Germany (for Bayreuth). A student in Heidelberg also writes to me on the subject of Bayreuth, and a man from Vienna, Herr August Hahn, reviews the performance of Tannhäuser there excellently.

“Little by little one gets through,” R. says, “all I need is time.”

I wrote all sorts of letters in connection with Bayreuth. R. works and is satisfied; he feels better. Family lunch; walk after lunch; we talk about the theme in the march in A Midsummer Night’s Dream, which begins as a return to the theme, and it certainly makes a very surprising effect in C major; but as a march theme it is in fact very absurd, and it is based on a joke, over which he always saw Mendelssohn smiling contentedly.

Reading the chapter yesterday in which Schopenhauer describes the nature of genius, I felt he had written it about R. R. writes to Herr Coerper; in the evening read Schopenhauer.

Sad feelings of my unworthiness; how to become worthy of R., to earn the happiness of his love? His goodness and his greatness I recognize ever more profoundly - how to repay him for so needing me?