Cosima's Diaries

Recordings by Cosima Wagner between 1869 and 1883

Cosima Wagner kept her diaries from 1 January 1869 at Tribschen until the night before Wagner’s death in Venice on 13 February 1883. She wrote them for her children, so that Siegfried would one day know his father “truly,” and she wrote nearly every day: Wagner’s talk, his dreams, the evening readings, the music, the visitors, debts and quarrels. No other source lets us hear him thinking aloud for so long. The diaries follow the Tribschen idyll, the building of the Bayreuth festival theatre and the composition of Parsifal.

The entries are arranged by year and month and each can be opened on its own page. The sections below trace the main lines of the diaries.

Cosima Wagner began her diaries at Tribschen on 1 January 1869 and kept them until the night before Wagner’s death in Venice on 13 February 1883. She wrote them for her children, and above all for Siegfried, so that he would one day know his father “truly,” and she wrote nearly every day: what Wagner said at breakfast, his dreams, the evening readings of Shakespeare, Calderón and Goethe, the music played at the piano, the visitors, illnesses, debts and quarrels. No other source lets us hear Wagner thinking aloud for so long, or shows so clearly how his ideas moved in his last fourteen years. At Tribschen the household lives in a private idyll, sealed by the birth of a son and by marriage, with the Ring resumed and Nietzsche a frequent guest. From 1872 everything turns to Bayreuth and the building of a festival theatre, achieved through years of fundraising and near collapse. After the 1876 Ring the diaries draw inward to Parsifal, written at Wahnfried and finished on long Italian journeys, while Wagner’s talk reaches toward a religion of compassion drawn from Schopenhauer, Buddhism and the Gospels. The same pages record, often and plainly, the antisemitism of both Wagner and Cosima.

Tribschen. The first pages are a confession. Cosima, who had left Hans von Bülow for Wagner, calls her love “a rebirth, a deliverance,” and writes under a constant sense of guilt toward her husband that she never lost. The years at Tribschen bring the birth of Siegfried in June 1869, her divorce and her marriage to Wagner in the Protestant church at Lucerne on 25 August 1870, the Franco-Prussian War, the essay Beethoven and the completion of Siegfried. On her birthday that Christmas she woke to the Siegfried Idyll played on the staircase. Nietzsche first called on 17 May 1869 and became almost one of the family; his manuscript on the birth of tragedy arrived as a Christmas gift in 1870. Wagner’s remarks already circle the themes of his last years. Music, he said in November 1869, “is the direct product of Christianity, as is the saint,” and the next spring he described the Knight of the Grail as free because “he acts, not in his own behalf, but for others.” If anyone asked whether there was a God, he said in 1870, he would answer that at a moment when thousands are singing to him, “God is alive, he is there.”

Founding Bayreuth. In April 1871 the Wagners first saw Bayreuth; its baroque opera house “will not do for us at all; so we must build.” The foundation stone was laid in the rain on 22 May 1872, Wagner’s birthday, followed by the Ninth Symphony in the old opera house. The next four years are full of patrons, Wagner societies, singers, architects, concert tours and money. A royal loan in 1874 rescued the enterprise, and the family moved into Wahnfried that April. On 21 November 1874 Wagner finished the score of Götterdämmerung, a day Cosima remembered with tears, because he was hurt to find her reading a letter from her father at that moment. In between, Cosima converted to Protestantism on 31 October 1872 and took Communion with Wagner: “I felt as if our bond had only now been truly sealed.”

The first festival. The Ring was given complete for the first time in August 1876, before the German Emperor and much of musical Europe. The diaries record the mishaps as well as the triumph, and the exhaustion afterwards: looking back that November, Wagner said his main feeling during the performances had been “Never again, never again!” The festival left a large deficit, and the autumn in Italy brought two meetings that would shape the coming years: the last time the Wagners spent with Nietzsche, at Sorrento, and the first meeting with Count Arthur de Gobineau in Rome on 30 November.

The Parsifal years. Wagner began Parsifal in earnest in 1877 and finished the prose draft on 28 February (“The Redeemer unchained!” Cosima wrote) and the poem on 19 April. Composing the Communion scene that August, he told her that “this scene of Holy Communion will be the main scene, the core of the whole work.” The music grew slowly through 1878 and 1879 beside the founding of the Bayreuther Blätter, the regenerative essays and campaigns against vivisection, and the widening break with Nietzsche. In 1880 the family moved to Naples, where Paul von Joukowsky joined them as stage designer and the garden at Ravello suggested Klingsor’s magic garden; in Siena that August the cathedral moved Wagner to tears and became a model for the Temple of the Grail. That November he conducted the Prelude privately for King Ludwig in Munich. Gobineau stayed at Wahnfried in 1881, and Wagner read his books on race and on the Persians with growing enthusiasm. The score was finished in Palermo on 13 January 1882. “With this, as with all his other works,” Cosima wrote, “he had feared being interrupted by death.”

The premiere and Venice. Sixteen performances of Parsifal followed in July and August 1882, conducted by Hermann Levi. Wagner asked that the audience not call the singers out after the second act, rebuked a chorister for joking about the bread, and at the last performance took the baton himself for the end of the third act. The family then settled in the Palazzo Vendramin in Venice. The last months bring the news of Gobineau’s death, Liszt’s long visit, Hans von Bülow’s breakdown, and on Christmas Eve a performance at La Fenice of the symphony Wagner had written at nineteen, played as a birthday present to Cosima. He was weakened by repeated heart spasms, and he was still talking about writing symphonies and an essay on the feminine. The last entry, on 12 February 1883, ends with him at the piano playing the Rhinedaughters’ lament: “Extraordinary that I saw this so clearly at that time!”

Spirituality. The diaries are themselves partly a religious document. Cosima wrote under a sense of “unatonable guilt” toward Bülow and turned it into a discipline of renunciation. After her conversion she took Communion regularly, writing in 1873 that “the only true communion with people is before the altar,” and she read Meister Eckhart, Tauler, the Theologia Germanica and the Imitation of Christ (“Non sum! How dearly I should like to make that my motto!”). Her devotion to Wagner took the same form, and she wrote that in him she found “not my happiness, but my salvation.”

Wagner’s own faith was heterodox and he said so. Its foundation was Schopenhauer: “it was Schopenhauer who revealed Christianity to me,” he told Cosima in 1879. Through Schopenhauer came Buddhism and the Vedanta, which run through the diaries from first to last: the Buddhist drama Die Sieger, often planned and never written; the Brahmin saying “tat tvam asi,” which he spoke to Cosima at Christmas 1874; readings of the Bhagavad-Gita, the Upanishads and, in Venice, a new life of the Buddha. He set the two traditions side by side rather than choosing between them. Brahmanism was “the religion of intelligence,” but Christianity stood above it as “the religion of suffering.” Buddhism was “a flowering of the human spirit” with no church and no compulsion, and by studying the Buddha, he said in 1882, “one learns to understand Christianity.” Cosima put the difference in a sentence of her own: “Buddha does not move one, he teaches; Christ teaches by moving.”

At the centre stood Christ, kept apart from the church. “I do not believe in God, but in godliness, which is revealed in a Jesus without sin,” Wagner said in 1879, and he repeatedly complained that people “think only of the church and confuse this with Christianity.” In his last years he said that he recognized “no religion except compassion,” extended to animals as well as people, and this lay behind his vegetarian leanings and his fury at vivisection. Art was to carry what the churches had lost. “Art makes religions eternal,” he said in 1872; music was “the only possible church nowadays”; and in 1879 he gave the core of Religion and Art in a sentence, that religion should “influence ethics, and allow faith to be represented by art, which can transform illusion into truth.” “The path from religion to art bad, from art to religion good,” he noted in 1880.

Parsifal was where these ideas met, and the diaries show how carefully he guarded its tone. He called it “his most propitiatory work” and spoke of it as the dream vision of a rite, not the rite itself. He kept Christ off the stage on principle: “One cannot paint Christ, but one can portray him in music,” and to have Christ sung by a tenor was “a disgusting idea.” What he hoped for from his audience was less instruction than inward change, a recognition of suffering that leads to compassion and resignation. In December 1882 he said he would never again try to explain his ideas on the blood of Christ: “these are things one all of a sudden grasps.” Six weeks later, talking of Nature’s cruelty, he said it went on “until the appearance of the Saviour on the cross,” and added, “in the urge to put an end to the whole of Nature’s will to live.”

Nietzsche. The diaries hold the whole arc of the friendship. Nietzsche arrives in 1869 as a brilliant young professor who “knows R.’s works thoroughly,” spends holidays at Tribschen, writes The Birth of Tragedy under Wagner’s spell and stands beside him at the foundation stone. Cosima noticed early “a dubious streak” in him. The last meetings were at Sorrento in 1876. When Human, All Too Human arrived in April 1878, Wagner resolved not to read it, and by 1879 Cosima wrote that Nietzsche had “committed the one sin which cannot be atoned for, the sin against the Holy Ghost.” In later years Wagner spoke of him with contempt and some sorrow, as a promising mind that the modern world had ruined, while Cosima admitted that she could still remember only his friendly side.

Antisemitism. Hostile remarks about Jews by both Wagner and Cosima recur from the first year to the last, aimed at the press, critics, money, Meyerbeer and the modern theatre. In 1873 Wagner opposed intermarriage in racial terms, and the remarks grow harsher from 1879, when the antisemitic movement gathered in Berlin. That October, reading a speech by Adolf Stoecker, he was “in favor of expelling them entirely.” In December 1881, after the Ringtheater fire in Vienna, Cosima records him making “a drastic joke to the effect that all Jews should be burned at a performance of Nathan der Weise.” From 1881 Gobineau’s racial theories enter the conversation, though Wagner usually set Christianity against them; in June 1881 he was “downright explosive in favor of Christian theories in contrast to racial ones,” and that December he said that races were “done for, and all that can now make an impact is, as I have ventured to express it, the blood of Christ.” He also refused to sign the 1880 petition to Bismarck against the Jews, declined to let the Bayreuther Blätter join the agitation, and complained that nobody had noticed what Know Thyself said about “our own blame for our situation.”

The same diaries show Wagner depending on Jewish colleagues, above all Joseph Rubinstein, Angelo Neumann and Hermann Levi, and they show how that dependence was poisoned. In 1880 Wagner said he could not let Levi conduct Parsifal “unbaptized,” and in 1881 he told him he hoped to find “a formula which will make you feel completely one of us.” When an anonymous letter that summer made Levi ask to be released, Wagner wrote persuading him to return, and Levi conducted every performance in 1882 and was with the family in Venice in February 1883. One of the last entries records Wagner saying that “the Jews, the good ones,” were “condemned to a gently resigned asceticism.”

Because the diaries run to thousands of entries, the table below is a finding aid rather than a summary. Choose a year and month to browse, or search the entries, then open a day to read it in full.

Year

Month

1869• 1870• 1871• 1872• 1873• 1874• 1875• 1876• 1877• 1878• 1879• 1880• 1881• 1882• 1883

Jan• Feb• Mar• Apr• May• Jun• Jul• Aug• Sep• Oct• Nov• Dec

Showing entries for February 1872 (27 total)

Date	Word Count	Subject
February 1, 1872	69	The day was consumed by household worries, with the chimneysweep causing distress and Loldi still confined to bed though somewhat improved. News from R. arrived by telegram: he had reached Bayreuth safely, secured the site for their house, and was moving through social obligations and practical business. Letters from Judith Mendfes, plus errands into town for the children’s clothes and shoes, made the day feel full but unsettled.
February 2, 1872	123	What began as an ordinary holiday turned into a crushing tragedy when the children returned from town to report that Fitzo had been killed by a locomotive. The writer rushed to the scene, buried the dog, and was overwhelmed by guilt and grief, feeling responsible for the loss. The sight of the mangled body and the sudden silence at home left a lasting shock that she believes will never fade.
February 3, 1872	89	She rose from a bleak night into a fresh snowfall that seemed to cover Fitzo’s grave and deepen her sadness. While the children appeared to be moving on, she felt alone in carrying the dog’s memory. A letter from R. brought news of his plans to go to Munich and his satisfaction with Bayreuth, Feustel, and their house prospects, which she received with a blessing for him.
February 4, 1872	100	R. sent word that he would be returning the next day, and the sudden promise of reunion coincided with the return of sunshine. The writer marked Saint Richard’s Day with extraordinary northern lights, which transformed the countryside into a scene of rare beauty and grandeur. Alongside these bright omens, she also noted correspondence from Elisabeth Krockow and a message from Nietzsche about a future visit to Basel.
February 5, 1872	150	R. came home at noon, and their reunion filled the day with joy after his absence. He recounted Bayreuth developments, harsh encounters with the Wagneriana circle, and his disgust with Berlin, while she shared the letters that had arrived in his absence. The evening was spent in intimate conversation, with both of them savoring the relief and happiness of being together again.
February 6, 1872	290	R. described his warm reception by the Grand Duke of Weimar, who praised his work and linked it to a specifically German spirit. He also relayed increasingly absurd and amusing stories about the Jewish community, which the writer found both revealing and entertaining. Their conversation turned to criticism of other writers and scholars, and she closed the day still admiring the depth of their companionship.
February 7, 1872	57	The day passed quietly with both of them working, each writing letters and attending to obligations. R. struggled with the disruption of their household, while she handled correspondence and matters for the children. In the evening, they briefly looked through a copy of Caroline and found it disappointing and thin.
February 8, 1872	420	R. spoke gloomily about living through three different generations and feeling that the present age could only be endured by trusting a future one. He expressed gratitude that this latest phase of life belonged to him because of her, and later played her his sketch for the Prelude. The day mixed work, teaching, and a difficult walk that revived their grief over Fitzo, even as they also delighted in Fidi and read Schopenhauer together.
February 9, 1872	504	R. worked while she asked him to dictate an account of his recent trip, which he then described in detail. His journey took him through Basel, Vienna, and Berlin, where he met friends, wrestled with Bayreuth business, and tried to understand the enigmatic Wagneriana circle. As he traced the confusion around its supposed support and leadership, the whole enterprise seemed to dissolve into empty talk and wishful reputation.
February 10, 1872	112	R. broke off his dictation, insisting that she already knew the story well enough to tell it better than he could. They read Schopenhauer on death, and he began the morning with a joyful song before turning bitter about the demands of composition and the way his profession keeps him from peaceful domestic life. She spent the day writing and teaching the children, while the fine weather drew her outdoors, though R. remained inside and seemed unsettled by it.
February 11, 1872	122	The day is spent around Wagner's work and his reflections on God, faith, and Isolde, which he links to immortality and to the spiritual force of music. He is unwell and bothered by the coal fire, though he still corrects proofs and keeps working. In the evening she reads Schopenhauer to him, and he explains how his ideas about the relation between words, music, and drama have been misunderstood.
February 12, 1872	372	The household stays busy with work, children, letters, and progress on the Rhinemaidens music, which the children sing in the garden. Wagner makes sharp remarks about audiences, German tastes, Bismarck, and the future of art, while also receiving supportive correspondence and patronage. The entry turns more reflective and bleak with fog, a silent walk, worries about the world, and an increasingly tired mood, though there is still some amusement over the children and the reading of Eliza Wille's novel.
February 14, 1872	66	Ash Wednesday brings the same gray fog, but Wagner keeps working while she writes to Chicago. They receive more letters about conductors, the Berlin fiasco, and public deception in the Kaspar Hauser affair, which leaves them disturbed. The evening ends more pleasantly with continued reading of Frau Wille's book, which they enjoy.
February 15, 1872	95	A letter from Nietzsche arrives while Wagner works and she looks after the children during family lunch, where Fidi is especially lively. Wagner is still not well, though he does manage a walk and they read together later in the day. She also notes his thoughts on Gustavus Adolphus, his comparison to Dietrich von Bern, talk of Bismarck's possible fall, and the reimbursement of a lost money order.
February 16, 1872	81	Wagner has a terrible night, the weather turns bleak again, and she is overcome with fear for his health as they both think about Fiteo's recent death. His remark that everyone is dying deepens the sense of isolation and loss. In the evening she reads him the novel, and a line from Dante leads him to praise the poet's vast grasp of the Middle Ages.
February 17, 1872	38	The weather briefly improves with a warm foehn wind, and Eva's birthday brightens the day. Wagner returns to work after reading a lecture by Dollinger about the Greek church, and they take an afternoon walk. She then becomes ill with a severe headache, while he reads her more of Frau Wille's book in the evening.
February 18, 1872	54	Spring seems to arrive with Eva, bringing splendid weather and a little relief for her. Wagner continues working, they manage a drive after lunch, and then receive an unexpected visit from Professor Nietzsche, who hears about Wagner's journey. The entry closes with a letter from Clemens Brockhaus about her conversion.
February 19, 1872	167	After a good night, Wagner plays the first scene for a friend, but the reaction leaves that visitor so shaken that he cannot eat and is exhausted for the rest of the day. The conversation turns to education and to what Wagner sees as the defensive pattern of German history, with music as the rare positive achievement. He also dismisses Faust as more of a sketch than a completed artwork, and the day ends with a friendly gift from the dean of Bayreuth.
February 20, 1872	101	Wagner remains worn down, despite attention from the Illustrirte Zeitung and its coverage of Bayreuth and the Nibelungen dramas. He reflects again on how German towns imitate greatness and jokes about dividing people by two ritual cries from Das unterbrochene Opferfest. His illness weighs on her as well, and the evening is spent continuing a dull novel that neither of them finds rewarding.
February 21, 1872	166	Wagner finally has a better night and moves ahead with the eighth volume of his writings, taking satisfaction in including his Munich struggles. He finishes Siegfried's reply to the Rhinemaidens, cutting lines he finds too meditative, and she is struck by the result when he plays it to her. The day ends in fog and showers, with a drive, more reading, and then an interruption at night when Vreneli goes into labor and gives birth to a daughter after hours of shared suffering.
February 22, 1872	399	A letter from Herr De Gubernatis arrives with news that a letter of mine has been printed and warmly praised, which gives R. and me some amusement. R. works while I tend the children, and though I am exhausted, the day is otherwise calm except for the usual disorder in the wider musical world and the arrival of the third volume of his collected writings. In the evening we finish reading State and Religion, and R. reflects on the freedom he feels because I share in his life and work.
February 24, 1872	120	The unpleasant business discussion from the previous day leaves R. badly shaken and sleepless, and the morning is consumed by legal formalities with the two men acting for him. News from Friedrich Feustel only adds to the discouragement, since important contributions are not being collected as hoped. By evening, however, Schopenhauer gives some relief, and the simple fact of being together again restores a sense of closeness and love.
February 25, 1872	371	R. has a better night and makes real progress, completing the first scene in ink and delighting in the force of Siegfried's cry. I spend time on letters while his annoyance at Cohn continues to trouble him, and rumors circulate about an attempted assassination of Prince Bismarck. The day also brings talk of Calderon, a stormy walk, encouraging news from Karlsruhe about the orchestra, and a warm remark from Vreneli about how much gentler R. has become.
February 26, 1872	203	After a disturbing night of dreams, I seek comfort from R., who has been dreaming of me as well, and the day settles into work on both sides. I finish the third act of Siegfried while R. recalls how his musical ideas are tied to old walks and places, as though memory had marked them for creation. The evening closes with a dance lesson and more Schopenhauer.
February 27, 1872	29	Rain and snow make the day difficult, and R. half-jokingly speaks of using the day's crutches to get through it. Aside from his steady work, nothing much occurs. In the evening we return to Schopenhauer and his teaching on renunciation.
February 28, 1872	150	R. quotes from Die Zauberflote and admires Sarastro as an especially humane German figure standing above opera's silliness. He also reads me his foreword, which looks back sadly on Munich, while a dream of a secret party I had given without him lingers in the background. Though he works and the children bring moments of humor, he feels physically unwell, and the day ends with letters, a walk, dancing, and Schopenhauer.
February 29, 1872	208	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.
No diary entries found.