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 December 1881 (29 total)

Date	Word Count	Subject
December 1, 1881	745	Richard moved easily from wigs and street cries to Richard III and army budgets, converting everything he noticed into sharp aesthetic or political judgments. A rainy walk to the bookshop and a disgusted glance at San Domenico led him into one of his broader condemnations of the Renaissance, which he saw as the seed of later rococo corruption rather than a durable ideal. The evening reading of Richard III, however, restored delight, especially in the play's wit, force, and inexhaustible theatrical life.
December 2, 1881	369	Another spasm after his bath did not stop Richard from returning to work, though he begged heaven for easy pages and complained of being done with ecstatic miracles, bass clarinets, and the old indulgence in sorrow. A walk through Palermo's narrow lanes, churches, and street life refreshed him, and he showed Cosima new corners of the city with real pleasure. By evening, with Richard III complete and Levi asking further questions about Parsifal, Richard sounded both artistically exacting and increasingly weary of having to explain everything himself.
December 3, 1881	1,100	Richard began with an early walk and reflections on truthfulness, humor, and the beggars of Italian progress, then spent the day wavering between contentment in Palermo and unease over the King, the weather, and the larger political atmosphere. He imagined dividing the year between Sicily and Germany, delighted in moonlit air, and confessed how bleak all this beauty would be without Cosima and the children. The row also folds in the next day's quieter continuation, where he praised the ease of working here, read Kant on the races, thought about instrumentation, and drifted back toward memories of Zurich, Tribschen, and future travels.
December 5, 1881	608	In good spirits after a cold sponge bath, Richard mocked Mendelssohn's Midsummer Night's Dream music and the self-satisfaction of Bayreuth commemorations, then turned admiringly to Schopenhauer's respectable life and to the saving power of print for works like Tristan. The day stayed gray and inward, shadowed by a child's sadness and by letters from afar, but a short seaside walk and readings from Goethe and Reichstag speeches kept talk lively. Even Siegfried's public drawing session became part of the family's Palermo theater of observation.
December 6, 1881	662	Richard worked before the family breakfast and spent the rest of the day moving between historical talk, Beethoven, instrumentation worries, and renewed despair over the world and over the Bayreuther Blaetter. A rainy walk under the cathedral's spell briefly refreshed him, but the children's future and the household's isolation weighed heavily on Cosima and colored the whole entry with private melancholy. By evening Richard had reduced his social misery to a familiar formula: foolish questions from others drove him to despair.
December 7, 1881	245	Wet weather and a drive replaced walking, while Kant, Berlin's success with Tristan, and Rubinstein's first proofs of the piano arrangement kept music at the center of the day. Richard was pleased by recognition coming at last from wider audiences, yet still insisted that no one took Tristan with the seriousness he himself did. Irritation over letters and business delays flared and then subsided into self-reproach, leaving the household amused instead by Princess Wittgenstein's etiquette and Palermo's shifting rain.
December 8, 1881	315	The children's tales of the Immaculate Conception feast led Richard into one of his characteristic meditations on the cruelty of nature, history, princes, uniforms, and modern rulers who can watch mass death and still go to the ballet. He worked long and hard into the evening, yet the emotional center of the day lay in Schiller's The Diver and in the raging sea, both of which stirred him deeply. Palermo's cloudy terrace views and Faustian thoughts about dams and suffering gave the whole entry a dark, elemental force.
December 9, 1881	253	A morning chest spasm passed, allowing Richard to enjoy a walk to the English Gardens, a carriage ride with Count Tasca, and the strange Arab beauty of La Zisa. Kant on the human races again absorbed him, and later talk with the children about the ancient world showed how instinctively he sided with genius and vivid individuality over Roman order. The day remained intellectually lively but physically precarious, suspended between architectural delight and the memory of Gladstone and Ireland.
December 10, 1881	861	Kant, Rhine wine, and a long afternoon among La Cuba, La Zisa, the Florio gardens, and their magnificent owl made this one of Richard's most visually delighted Palermo days. Yet the evening turned severe when a question about the Vienna theater fire drew from him a harsh distinction between meaningless mass entertainment and labor or sacrifice undertaken for an idea. Schiller's poems then carried the household back into more elevated feeling, especially when the sacred ceremony of the Mass was set against secret violence in The Journey to the Forge.
December 12, 1881	522	Breakfast wit about names and Princess Wittgenstein gave way to a visit with Count Tasca and an afternoon walk in which Richard again complained of how completely his work absorbed him. The owl, Weber, Bach, Mendelssohn, and old Dresden memories all drifted through his talk, showing how constantly past music fed the pressure of the present score. By supper he had widened the day into a metaphysical question, wondering whether existence might yet have an ethical purpose and concluding that a genuinely good person was rarer than anything else.
December 13, 1881	188	Chest spasms, bad weather, and bleak letters shadowed the day, though Count Tasca's tour of a splendid villa provided a brief lift and a vision of possible residence. Richard forced himself through another page despite illness and then collapsed into a quiet, peaceful evening. Throughout the entry the Nile loomed larger than Palermo itself, less as a concrete journey than as an imagined escape from fatigue and bad news.
December 14, 1881	109	With better rest and steady work behind him, Richard spent the afternoon revisiting the Florio owl and the evening moving restlessly across Bach, Auber, operatic vitality, and his own exhausting task. He presented his article on vivisection to a priest and described Parsifal not as a work of suffering but as his most propitiatory creation, as if its labor were also a kind of offering. The day feels lighter than the previous one, but only because artistic talk kept illness at bay.
December 15, 1881	445	Richard woke under the spell of a troubling dream about Hans and death, and although later letters brought some reassurance, the whole day remained permeated by melancholy. He worked, counted the thirty pages still separating him from the end of the score, and distracted himself with wild sea views and fantasies of future travel under blue skies. By evening a game of whist, newspaper absurdities, and his renewed fear that no one would understand his works after his death revealed how closely artistic anxiety and mortal anxiety had become entwined.
December 16, 1881	515	A cough of Cosima's, chest weakness after a walk with the children, and a stream of newspapers kept Richard on edge throughout the day, though camellias and garden air gave him some moments of calm. His political disgust sharpened in response to Ireland, the stock exchange, and especially the Vienna theater catastrophe, toward which he felt less pity than contempt for the society that produced it. Characteristically, even a comic postcard about a fake umbrella advertisement found its place amid these darker reflections.
December 17, 1881	923	Another bath brought another spasm, yet Richard quickly transformed weakness into long speculation on Kant's racial seeds, on dying national stocks, and on the possibility of renewal through a more spiritual bloodline. He worked, read, laughed over Ariosto, and remained capable of gratitude for letters, though a rainy outing with the children ended badly when frustration and exertion provoked still another attack. The evening's discussion of theater and the so-called people returned him to a central conviction: art is not created for abstractions like the people, but for concrete forms, spaces, and intelligences.
December 18, 1881	550	Richard and Cosima both traced his recurring spasms to the strain of finishing Parsifal, and even his breakfast cheer could not hide how exacting the work had become. He ranged from Lessing and Jewish arrogance to Calderon, then drove through sunshine to the sea and revealed new details of the score with undiminished pride, especially the ceremonial orchestration of Parsifal's entrance. The day closed with one of Cosima's compact insights, which Richard immediately turned into symbol: Tristan and Parsifal now stood apart, divided by the blood of Christ.
December 19, 1881	360	A bad night, another spasm, and Wolfegen's article on Kleist set Richard in a mixed mood of annoyance and talkative brilliance. He mocked Faust's shallow satisfactions, reflected on Homer and the Dorians, endured a servant's mistake, and still found room for cheerful stories for the children and a merry whist game. Even the memory of Vienna's extinguished gaslights became for him a symbolic image, as if modern disaster always reached backward into his own past.
December 20, 1881	238	Exhausted from the night yet still determined to work, Richard allowed himself an afternoon diversion at Princess Butera's splendid palace, where the hostess's abrupt charm amused the household. Rubinstein's piano score satisfied him only in part and mainly served to deepen his vexation with the stale reduction of living orchestral thought. Alone with Cosima, he returned to the real torment: how to orchestrate the ending of Parsifal with the richer wind groups he felt it demanded.
December 21, 1881	282	This was one of Richard's worst days of the month, marked by digestive blockage, a failed attempt to go out, violent agitation, and the confession that the whole world had become unreal and estranged to him. To distract him, Cosima read from Madame de Remusat, and gossip about Gobineau gave him a little pleasure, but his mind kept circling back to the score and to the crushing years that had preceded it. Parsifal appears here explicitly as both burden and rescue, written after the Ring to save himself from the aftermath of Bayreuth.
December 22, 1881	403	After a good night Richard recovered enough humor to joke at breakfast, enjoy the street singer below, and work steadily before lunch. Anger over Lusch and Liszt soon unsettled him again, but the afternoon visit to the enchanting Villa Camastra and a new staging idea for the end of Parsifal restored his creative excitement. Even an evening troubled by lobster, ghosts of orchestration, and Rubinstein's family difficulties could not erase the sense that the work itself was still opening new solutions to him.
December 23, 1881	114	The gray weather drove Richard indoors to Madame de Remusat, whose portrait of Napoleon delighted him so much that he kept trying its epigrams and tempers on for size. A short drive ended quickly, and the day narrowed into reading, amusement, and growing physical discomfort. By evening he was unwell enough to retreat early to bed, carrying Napoleon and Talleyrand with him as his chosen companions of the hour.
December 24, 1881	347	Christmas Eve began in suspense over the missing post and turned into surprise when Joukowsky suddenly appeared in person with the awaited things. What might have become a spoiled birthday instead culminated in an unexpected tree shining in the conservatory, restoring festivity and private joy with overwhelming force. The evening remained merry, animated by Madame de Remusat and by Richard's admiration for a woman's superior truthfulness in observing people and events.
December 25, 1881	253	Christmas Day brought Cosima her gifts from Richard and the children, above all the completed score, turning the morning into one of the emotional high points of the year. Bad weather kept everyone indoors, but not even that could diminish the radiance of lunch, memories, music from Polonia, and Richard's interrupted attempt to toast his wife. The day ended in affectionate recollection, with even Madame de Remusat yielding to the larger drama of Richard's own life and offering.
December 26, 1881	118	Gray weather and small practical vexations were softened by one piece of comic news: Lohengrin had been banned in Paris, a fact Richard found both amusing and flattering. He worked, visited the Palazzo Gangi, and later played whist while the children attended a gift distribution there. Their delayed return unsettled him more than he expected, showing how deeply he wanted to end the day in immediate family warmth.
December 27, 1881	206	Richard woke refreshed and in high spirits, enjoying late-arriving presents for Cosima, joking over the Fliegende Blaetter, and speaking enthusiastically about the mazurka as a true popular creation. On the way to Villa Camastra he turned once more toward the Orient, seeing Western civilization as an imitation of older eastern forms. Rubinstein's Beethoven and Chopin in the evening only heightened his gaiety, which spilled over into impossible-to-record jokes and exuberant nonsense.
December 28, 1881	540	Sunshine returned, but Richard remained inwardly strained by his work and by lingering resentments, so that a splendid excursion to Monreale could not prevent an evening explosion against visual artists and the shallow delights of courtly display. Cosima wisely withdrew rather than answer, and after his quick repentance the household returned to whist and calmer talk. The entry makes clear how physical malaise, artistic grievance, and old disappointments could still fuse suddenly into fury even amid Palermo's beauty.
December 29, 1881	406	A chest spasm on waking gave way to a cheerful breakfast and a friendly reconciliation with Joukowsky, but the day darkened abruptly with the telegram announcing Karl Brandt's death. Richard was shaken not only by personal loss but by the realization that Brandt had been his one truly reliable man, and the news reopened all his fears about uncertainty, sudden disaster, and the fragility of human plans. A drive to the owl and an evening of whist steadied him somewhat, though not enough to dispel the day's desolation.
December 30, 1881	204	Though another spasm followed his bath, sunshine and visitors helped turn the day outward as Richard worked, called on the prefect, and drove to the Villa Belmonte. Evening company unexpectedly pleased him: once he joined the salon, he played and arranged music with real hospitality and took satisfaction in the impression made on the ladies. Afterward he praised the guests and even proposed regular evenings at home, as though Palermo society had finally become manageable on his own terms.
December 31, 1881	218	The last day of the year was marred by chest pain, stubborn ink, and the thousand petty vexations that made Richard insist life was terrible in small things as well as great ones. Yet there was still delight in the botanical garden, quiet progress on the score, and a little satisfaction in seeing the remaining pages diminish. The year closed not with ceremony but with work, an abandoned Keller novella, a ball for Bonus, and Richard's confession that at times only music still seemed real.
No diary entries found.