Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of June 30, 1873

Overview

R. begins the day exhausted and burdened by moral and material worries, with little confidence in what is visible and no easy grounds for hope. Wagner herself has a painful morning over literary plagiarism and the misuse of ideas associated with R., but decides not to make a public issue of it. House delays and a huge thunderstorm deepen the sense of obstruction, though reading the Nordic sagas restores a measure of imaginative vitality. The sagas' vivid scenes and rough moral force seem to stand above everything else, offering a world more commanding than contemporary disputes.

Content

Monday, June 30:

R. did not have a good night, and he works without pleasure, his head too full of all sorts of moral and material worries. How difficult his path still is! All that is visible gives one no grounds for hope, but since one goes on working and creating, and consequently hoping, one puts one’s faith in the Unknown!

I spend a very painful morning with Herr Dahn and the Wartburg war; the former writes poems in which he presents Heinrich von Ofterdingen as Tannhäuser and allows him to talk about Elisabeth, without giving the least acknowledgment to R., which really vexes me, and I feel like writing to the Literaturblatt, but we agree to let it pass.

Much trouble with the house; our move will probably be long delayed.

In the evening, huge thunderstorm and Uhland! The Nordic sagas seem to us to overshadow everything with their vividness: the hero seeing the sea through the opening in Wotan’s cloak, the recognition with his son, the old Icelander who does not wish to carry his son in his bag, who refuses the fine for the murder and instead is kind to the murderer!