Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of June 28, 1873

Overview

Work at the new house continues, now with experiments in heating and repeated visits that make the project feel tangible but still unfinished. The garden and Fidi remain sources of delight, while artistic life carries on through sits, readings, and coffee-hour conversation. Wagner also indulges in operatic reflection, admiring French theatrical instinct and the expressive treatment of musical and dramatic detail. The day presents a harmony of private improvement and aesthetic speculation, as if the household and the art could both be brought into better order.

Content

Saturday, June 28:

To the house in the morning, experiments with hot-air heating. Joy in the garden and in Fidi! In the afternoon a sitting, in the evening Uhland.

In our conversation over afternoon coffee we set both the large and the small worlds to rights, as R. expresses it.

At lunch he tells me about the opera Une Nuit dans la Forêt by Dalayrac, an opera about a rescue, like all those written after the Revolution how touching and interesting this was; then about a new French opera he saw in Paris in which two knights silently realize that they must fight each other, and they then fight how excellently this was played.

“Yes, the French are certainly actors, magnificent ones. But warm, serene tone in which the Landgraf, for instance, should sing.”