Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of September 10, 1873

Overview

The narrator stayed home because of cold weather and ill health, tending to letters while R. faced hostile press reactions and unease among friends over his theater proposal. He argued about the freedom of the press, the jury system, and the shortcomings of parliamentarianism, preferring corporative representation and expert judgment over open debate. In the afternoon they listened to music from Götterdämmerung and later to R.’s reading of Parsifal. The entry closes with her reflection on his genius, her sorrow at his exhaustion, and their practical resolve to raise Fidi with independence, frugality, and freedom from dependence on others.

Content

Wednesday, September 10:

I am supposed to have sittings with our dear Kietz, but the autumn weather is so cold, and I feel so unwell, that I stay at home, attending to letters and other things. R. is also having difficulties all around; his circular has produced nothing but spiteful remarks in the press and meaningless consternation among his friends, who are alarmed by his proposal to turn the theater into a joint-stock enterprise. He talks about the freedom of the press, then about the jury system, with comparisons to the lay assessor’s court. Do we owe anything at all to the Revolution of ’89? An emphatic no: we have been diverted by it from our own true development onto foreign sidetracks, parliamentarianism, freedom of the press, whereas in fact all interests should be represented by corporations, and once these interests have become satisfied, decisions should be announced, without the arguments of people who know and understand nothing about it. Politics, he says, have become a free-for-all, like philosophy in Byzantium, where a barber could talk to a church father about proofs of the Trinity.

In the afternoon, music from Götterdämmerung: “Hagen’s Watch,” “Hagen’s Call,” the “End of the World” and after supper R. reads us his Parsifal. Ever-increasing astonishment at this divine power of his. I am reminded of what Schopenhauer says about the reaction of Nature, which produces many twins after big wars. In the same way, I imagine, the emergence of a Shakespeare was a powerful reaction against the oppression of the Anglo-Saxon spirit, which then broke through in this tremendous way; the emergence of Wagner is an equally powerful act of salvation for the German spirit. Doubtless in all this Nature is only looking after itself, and is then indifferent to the awful gap which is created, as if stating, as it were, that though the race may be destroyed, by mixing with the Jews and insuperable Latin influences, the spirit is saved, the image remains. The difference between these volcanic outbreaks of genius and its blossoming from the normal development of things in Greece.

But when I see R., who is never tired when he is active in his element, worn out and pulled in all directions because of the gap between him and his fellow beings, then I feel an unutterable grief and, like Falstaff, I could wish it were bedtime and all well.

Warning for Fidi! We decide to bring him up to be glad that he has inherited a little property, and then to protect his independence with the utmost frugality, to traffic with the world only on the basis of compassion, and to desire and demand nothing from it, for this way lies hell. He should make do with the top story of the house, keep only one servant, and, with the help of his books, be diligent and free; and remember what his father had to suffer because he was dependent on other people, who did not understand him. R. writes to Councilor DiiffL, asking him to receive Feustel.