Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of September 3, 1873

Overview

A dream involving the narrator and R. became an extended joke for the day, especially in his teasing remarks about her father’s visits and how her attention shifts when he is present. Beneath the humor, R. was irritated by the poor supervision of the house and spent time reading about Italic antiquity in relation to German and Roman questions. In the evening he reconsidered Norse material in Uhland, seeing later poetic embellishment rather than pure ancient myth. He also reminisced about early musical impressions from Weber and praised Mozart’s boldness in choosing Don Giovanni.

Content

Wednesday, September 3:

A dream which I relate to R., and in which he figured, gave him cause to remark, “That must have been your father.” This joke dominates the whole day. To Malwida he says, “How glad I shall be, at the time of his next visit, to have you as a companion,” for when I am together with my father, he claims, everything else is forgotten! The diverting way in which he says this makes us laugh heartily. But with regard to the house he unfortunately finds much to vex him; scarcely any house can ever have been built with so little supervision.

R. has done some work, and now he is reading a book about Italic antiquity, always in relation to the question that interests him: German and Roman. In the evening we continue reading Uhland; R. says he no longer has the veneration for these Norse songs which he used to have, he cannot discern in them the original Germanic myths, but rather the poetic embroideries of the skalds, in which the original features appear in a mixed form.

When I tell him he should choose our evening reading entirely according to his own wishes, he replies that in this matter he feels like Siegfried with Brünnhilde - he can hear me, and takes delight in that, not concerned with the sense.

At table he says he was thinking: “My God, if Cosima were to have seen the company among which I lived in Königsberg, for example! Those play actors who attended my first wedding, Frau Hübsch, the director’s wife, like a gypsy in her poppy-red satin dress! Oh, where did I crawl out from!”

After supper he plays passages from Preciosa and tells me what an impression the march with the triangle made on him when he heard it for the first time from the proscenium box as an 8-year-old boy. “And the magic sound of the clarinet - I still often think of that. What Beethoven did unconsciously in his instrumentation Weber chose consciously; an engaging German character.” R. describes Mozart’s choice of the Don Giovanni libretto as a remarkable piece of boldness, the urge to free himself from the academic conventions of Metastasio.