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 July 1872 (31 total)

Date	Word Count	Subject
July 1, 1872	314	The day began with irritation over the hotel’s poor management, though Lulu’s toothache was easing and R. was buoyed by rereading his old letter to Marie Wittgenstein, despite the absurd interpretation it once received. He read Darwin with pleasure and regretted not knowing Schopenhauer earlier, while I worried that even great ideas so often make little impression on the world. In the garden we watched the district president’s family near the Duke and Duchess, then took the children out walking, where Fidi’s stubbornness upset R. and reminded me how easily his mood darkens when work is interrupted.
July 2, 1872	323	R. brought his photograph to my bed as a playful attempt to win forgiveness, but his own ill health and the usual household disorder left the day strained. A telegram announced Marie Muchanoff’s arrival, and at lunch R. spoke despairingly enough to suggest leaving the world together if not for the children, who kept hope alive for him. He found comfort in Darwin and in Gibbon, especially in ideas about moral progress and the politics of Constantine, and he again lamented that dramatists do not mine Gibbon’s richly drawn historical material.
July 3, 1872	147	I spent a sleepless night haunted by Dr. Lang’s insults and by the fear that anyone could attack me without consequence, despite my wish to live quietly for R. and the children. Marie Muchanoff telegraphed that she would arrive the next day, which forced a hurried rearrangement of the house and packed the children into a downstairs room. R. was also melancholy, but during a walk he was unexpectedly moved by fireflies in the dark woods and came back comforted, even to the point of tears.
July 4, 1872	137	The day began with a trip into town after R. had already been at work, followed by lunch with the Feustels and disquieting news about Ottilie’s son-in-law, who seemed to be reduced to looking for work with the railroad. Herr von Gersdorff arrived in the afternoon, and conversation turned excitedly to Tristan, which had made a powerful impression on everyone. Later, Marie Muchanoff came, and what should have been a happy reunion was dulled by talk of gossip and slights in the outside world. The evening ended quietly with the four of them talking alone about many things.
July 5, 1872	239	While R. worked, I spent the morning with our friend, whose steadiness and warmth contrasted sharply with the upsetting rumors and falsehoods circulating around us. One especially maddening story involved a woman claiming to have seen a letter from me, and I wished I could remain in ignorance of such nonsense. In the afternoon Herr von Gersdorff described a plan for a public appeal involving Nietzsche and support for Wagner’s cause, and later Herr Krebs appeared with a bizarrely childish artwork and grandiose ideas about painting concepts. After R. sent him off with Nietzsche’s book, we were left both astonished and amused by the whole spectacle.
July 6, 1872	94	A cold from the previous day’s walk had taken away my voice, while R. stayed busy with work. I drove with our friend and the children to the opera house and the festival grounds, where the little ones supplied their own comic names for everything they saw. The evening brought conversation with our friends, along with R.’s playing of music from G?tterd?mmerung. The day closed in a mood of labor and domestic distraction, with R. still working.
July 7, 1872	69	Herr von Gersdorff left in the morning, and the children went to church while R. kept working and I remained voiceless. Later we visited the Svendsens, who shared pleasant stories about Kassel. The evening was disturbed by the return of Herr Krebs, whose stubbornness and odd emotional strain became increasingly clear. He left bitter and unsettled, leaving us with an uncomfortable impression.
July 8, 1872	351	I accompanied our friend to the station, and although she seemed content with her visit and the children had behaved well, her presence left me with a heavy sadness. Her account of the world around her was so bleak and joyless that it felt like a tragedy stripped of dignity, and our farewell was emotional. The heat and interruptions kept R. from working, though the children and a walk in the park offered brief relief. Later there were small matters of house and theater business, a telegram about a possible Lohengrin engagement in Milan, and R.’s amused but serious reflections on reading Die Ahnfrau.
July 9, 1872	154	The day opened with another strange note from Herr Krebs, whose self-important despair only deepened our sense of absurdity, and a letter from New York asking about the Magic Fire Music and patronage certificates. R. worked, though with a discouraged spirit, while I copied my letter to Frau von Meyendorff and immediately regretted having to enter the web of replies and social maneuvering. He later inspected the progress on our house and was visibly moved by how far the work had advanced. A letter from nephew Fritz also raised hopes of arranging a marriage with my Viennese Liszt cousin.
July 10, 1872	111	The morning brought a flood of nonsense from various people, including a man from Coburg sending drawings for the King of Bavaria and another scheme linking Toser to support for Bayreuth and the Nibelungs in Berlin. In contrast, my greatest comfort was the children, especially Fidi, who seemed full of promise. R. worked, and after lunch we went into town, visited the Feustels, and checked on the house we expect to rent. The walk home through splendid weather and birdsong gave R. fresh musical ideas, and the evening ended with a little Gibbon.
July 11, 1872	202	Minister Schleinitz sent Lulu an assortment of seals, prompting letters and thanks, while R. received a Schubert medallion that did not satisfy him. He worked, then visited the Svendsens about copying for the King before we went out for a walk. During the walk R. reflected bitterly on the difference between literary work and composing, especially when a score depends on public performance and a theater audience. The day’s experiences with the outside world only strengthened our resolve to keep to ourselves as much as possible and to avoid unnecessary social entanglements.
July 12, 1872	89	The heat was intense, and I spent time working with the children in the garden while R. managed only a few lines. He also had to deal with legal business connected to a theater manager in Chemnitz, and we both went to inspect the building site, where the work was moving ahead well. Returning home, we found the Kraussolds waiting, and later the Svendsens came by again. R. had hoped to secure copying work from them, but the composer himself showed little enthusiasm.
July 13, 1872	247	R. returned again and again to the happiness of literary labor, arguing that great writers often seemed melancholy only because their full artistic powers could not unfold in their own time. In the afternoon and evening the Feustels and J. Rubinstein came, and Rubinstein’s playing, especially a Bach fugue, left us deeply moved. R. described the music as if it were speaking from the future, carrying with it a sense of restless forward motion and hidden knowledge. I felt something different in it, hearing not only life but also the voice of stone, mountain, and the inorganic world.
July 14, 1872	363	In the little church, the hymns and the sight of the poor Hummelbauer people moved the writer into a state that felt like prayer itself, though the sermon afterwards broke the harmony of the morning. She spent the rest of the day with the family and children, still unwell, and was struck anew by birdsong, shadows, flowers, and the laboring poor who tend them. In the afternoon Herr Rubinstein came to make music with Richard, who was still rough in manner but clearly full of promise.
July 15, 1872	196	Rumors about Hans’s supposed move to Mannheim caused anxiety, but the family avoided speaking of it because they could not make sense of the report. After some gardening and a visit to the Schweizerei, the storm-washed evening turned beautiful, with salamanders, birds, and church bells setting the scene. Richard and Rubinstein then worked through the third act of Siegfried, while the household continued its usual mixture of children, work, and correspondence.
July 16, 1872	66	Loldi’s illness and miserable weather kept the morning indoors, with Richard occupied by his work. Later he developed his orchestral plan for Wilhelmj, and the afternoon was spent again among the children at the Schweizerei. In the evening the Svendsens arrived and the first act of Siegfried was gone through, with Herr Rubinstein showing real understanding and careful handwriting.
July 17, 1872	132	Letters arrived from Lenbach, who would now begin Richard’s portrait, as well as from Nietzsche and Frau von Meyendorff. The day moved between garden life with the children, concern over Loldi’s inflamed eye, and a serious walk with J. Rubinstein that led into a deep discussion of Schopenhauer. Richard played Tristan in the evening, but the tempo seemed elusive to the musicians.
July 18, 1872	171	The house contract arrived for Richard’s signature, and he reflected in characteristic fashion on his dream of eventual burial beneath the chestnut trees on the terrace. He read about Garrick and compared great actors to rare poets, then spun an odd but vivid analogy about the Romans of the fifth century. After a family lunch, a walk, and a visit from Rubinstein at the piano, the day ended with a curious report in the newspaper about Perfall and Bülow.
July 19, 1872	340	The fifth volume arrived, along with a letter from Gersdorff, while Richard continued his legal and theatrical errands in town. Excavation work at the festival site amused and unsettled him, and later he found comfort in a vivid article that reasserted Bismarck’s superior knowledge of events. The evening became more personal when a biographical note about him caused a momentary sting before she accepted it with reflection, and the night drive home under moonlight felt deeply emotional.
July 20, 1872	101	Richard joked that he must now compose verses for the end of the world, and then worked without interruption for the rest of the day. She stayed with the children in the garden while Loldi remained unwell, and a good medallion arrived from Vienna, along with a relieving letter from her mother. In the evening he sang from Tristan and told Nordic sagas, but refused to perform more because his final scene still demanded all his attention.
July 21, 1872	175	A peaceful Sunday was interrupted at first by the architect, but Richard recovered his focus and reached the end of the act, though the remaining work left him highly charged. When she spoke of once imagining a celebration for the completion of the Nibelungen, he teased her for wanting an outward sign after having already been the one who sustained him. Later they enjoyed books about sacred mountains and the origins of the Nordic sagas, then took a moonlit walk and finished the evening with Darwin.
July 22, 1872	367	The day revolved around the house, Fidi, and the completed sketch, which brought the writer to a profound emotional turning point. Richard was both proud and restless, joking about gods, ghosts, and the dead who had vanished from his life, while also quarreling over the pronunciation of Waltraute and criticizing modern composers. In the evening, despite his fragility and Rubinstein’s presence, they talked about opera and Richard especially admired Méhul’s Joseph.
July 23, 1872	149	After a poor night, Richard finally finished his figurations and remarked that music can never truly end, only begin again in another form. He then corrected the biography and met her in the park at the Sappho sofa, a favorite stone bench by the pond. The day closed with her reading aloud about the Goethe Foundation, where she was cast as the representative of the visual arts, alongside a new commission from Philadelphia.
July 24, 1872	414	The day opens with Fidi at breakfast and a stream of remarks from R. about art, genius, and the completion of Götterdämmerung, which fills the household with exhilaration. He is still absorbed in correcting his biography, but the news of Franziska Ritter and the finished score of the Ring cycle seems to connect everyone in a wordless understanding. Later, Goethe and Faust are read with intense reverence, while inferior Nibelungen settings by Hebbel and Jordan are judged almost ruinous to the subject.
July 25, 1872	68	R. keeps working over the biography corrections, though he cannot hide his longing to return to composing. In the afternoon the whole family drives to the Riedelsberg to visit the Feustels, where R. enjoys speaking about philology with the schoolteachers Fries and Nagelsbach. They come home late, after a pleasant and socially satisfying outing.
July 26, 1872	93	The family is pleased with Fidi's good conduct from the previous day, though the heat is oppressive and Loldi's eye remains a concern. R. divides his day between biography corrections and practical business matters, and Herr Rubinstein visits in the evening without any music making. The day ends with the Lenbach paintings being packed away, leaving the wall bare and strangely restful despite the household's admiration for the pictures.
July 27, 1872	176	Despite the closeness of the weather, she manages to work in the garden with the children and later continues reading Faust. A difficult verse puzzles both her and R., and they are amused by their shared uncertainty, while a notice about a concert only strengthens their contempt for Mendelssohn's treatment of Sophocles. News from the Wagner circle, a letter from Nietzsche, and a visit from Herr Diener keep the day full of musical and intellectual interest, ending with rehearsal work on Rheingold.
July 28, 1872	188	While the children are in church, she stays in the garden with Fidi and Eva writing letters, as R. continues his biography work and reads a mountain book with curiosity. The weather turns stormy, and the evening brings tenor, pianist, and singing from Herr Diener, along with the completion of Rheingold. R. is shaken by news that the Beethoven descendant he once recommended has been arrested, while other letters bring developments about publishers, Berlin, and her father.
July 29, 1872	221	A stormy night and a comic breakfast story about Herr Rubinstein's disastrous attempt to sing his own song set the tone for the day. R. is delighted by Fritzsch's report that the collected works are selling well, which vindicates him against earlier claims that no one wanted them. He continues with the biography and rehearsal work, but ends the day irritated that he is still surrounded by immature people.
July 30, 1872	356	Loldi's inflamed eyes cause serious worry, and she is taken to the hospital on both days. Alongside that concern, R. writes to Bayreuth-related contacts, responds to errors in Lang's biography, and continues preparing his essay on actors and singers. He grows reflective about the waste of his old life, the burden of relationships, and the sense that his true existence is bound to his work, to her, and to the children, though the evening is clouded by hurt when Lang's name comes up.
July 31, 1872	217	R. is in a sour mood over being forced to deal with foolish people, and he admits that the pleasure of a piece is greatest only at the moment of sketching it. The morning conversation turns to the limits of speech and the idea that only love or artistic exaltation can really bridge human isolation. News from the Academic Wagner Society and from Leipzig shows how widely Wagner enthusiasm has spread, and the day closes with another scene from Die Walküre.
No diary entries found.