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 January 1881 (30 total)

Date	Word Count	Subject
January 1, 1881	805	On New Year's Day, Wagner and Cosima spend the day in animated intellectual exchange, touching on Beethoven's symphonic introductions, the limits of musicians' understanding, and the superior art of Mozart's Don Giovanni. They welcome friends, stroll through the palace gardens, and end the evening with Wagner reading aloud about fashion politics before bed. Amid all the sociability, a tender private moment surfaces as the two reflect on their Zurich past and the unlikely path that finally brought them together.
January 2, 1881	142	After a restful night and a brisk morning walk, Wagner spends the evening orchestrating before the couple settles in to read Cervantes together. They find the story charming but formulaic, and Wagner distills his impression of its aristocratic characters—and of the whole Renaissance sensibility—into a single dismissive word. The entry is brief and quiet, shaped by mild weather and mild literary disappointment.
January 3, 1881	280	Wagner wakes in good humor and muses warmly on their approaching silver anniversary, recalling with amusement his romantic uncertainties before Cosima. The day is filled with winter walks, a pleasant review of his own published essays, and a lively evening gathering in which political and archaeological news—a possible rediscovery of Phidias's Athena, Bismarck's maneuvering against a preacher—provokes sharp commentary. The departure of daughter Lusch for Berlin closes the day on a note of familial tenderness, with Wagner reflecting on the unexpected blessing of five children surrounding him in his later years.
January 4, 1881	421	A well-rested day sees Wagner absorbed in Gobineau's stories and charmed by a sketch of Kundry, which prompts him to imagine the character more boldly sensual than stage convention allows. The afternoon walk is suffused with quiet beauty—a setting sun, a crescent moon, the evening star—leaving Cosima deeply moved and contemplative about a longing for some ideal, unreachable realm. The evening turns lively with a reading of Hoffmann's "Councilor Tusmann," which Wagner defends as genuinely inventive, a credit to German letters.
January 5, 1881	364	Wagner passes a difficult day, troubled by a poor night, intrusive business correspondence, and a blustery walk that does little to restore him. Over lunch, conversation turns to the philosophy of jealousy and love, with Wagner insisting that the assumption of a shared beloved strikes at the very root of one's existence. In the evening he works through a tricky passage in the Parsifal orchestration, discovering that a missing word in his own sketch—dereinst—had been an important rhythmic anchor all along.
January 6, 1881	735	Wagner begins the day in bed, in expansive philosophical mood, ranging from the artistic challenges of a hypothetical Buddhist opera to the question of whether a conversion formula might be devised for his conductor Levi. He is forthright in his contempt for modern culture and for women of the ruling class who refuse to engage with moral questions like vivisection, insisting that women, not soldiers, are the proper custodians of idealism. The afternoon is occupied by three stubborn bars in the Parsifal score, while the evening drifts into a sardonic discussion of so-called Platonic friendships among the aristocracy.
January 8, 1881	366	Wagner is ambivalent about the conference visitors, feeling no particular eagerness to stage Parsifal despite the joy its composition gave him, and he is initially curt with the guests who arrive in the evening. The mood lifts when his friend Rubinstein plays a Liszt arrangement of a Hummel septet, and Wagner finds real merriment in its old-fashioned padding. After the guests depart, Wagner and Cosima are left alone together and experience one of those charged, quietly rapturous moments of rediscovery that recur throughout the diary.
January 9, 1881	352	Despite a poor night, Wagner is buoyant at breakfast and launches into a sustained defense of patience as the truest form of courage, invoking Frederick the Great and early Christian martyrs as models. He grows ill during the midday meal and has to leave the table, though he recovers in time for the afternoon walk and an evening gathering to close out the Bayreuth conference. Alone afterward, he confides to Cosima that his reverence for her continues to deepen while the rest of the world grows increasingly remote.
January 10, 1881	463	The morning opens on a somber note as Wagner and Cosima acknowledge the irony of discussing Christian renunciation against a backdrop of widespread poverty and suffering. A visit to Joukowsky's studio to review the Magic Garden design proves inconclusive, but a long coffee conversation about Gobineau's Ottar Jarl sparks Wagner's bold claim that the Ring des Nibelungen stands as the first truly original work in Western literature. The evening turns tense when a friend's offhand remark about Jews and cattle-trading provokes Wagner's anger, an outburst he immediately regrets.
January 11, 1881	320	The day begins with Wagner reporting a dream about Corfu's neutrality, setting a lightly comic tone that carries through his jokes about inheriting Fidi's gold pencil. Conversation over meals revisits Feustel's shallow optimism and Empress Augusta's petty treatment of Lusch, whom Wagner dismisses as incapable even of making others happy. The evening closes pleasantly with Cosima reading aloud from Gobineau, a story Wagner enjoys just as much the second time, while he mentions keeping a notebook by the mirror to capture musical ideas that come to him while dressing.
January 12, 1881	305	Despite a restless night, Wagner worked with evident joy and presided cheerfully over lunch, where the household toasted one another with wine bearing his name and he quietly dedicated his glass to the children. Friends gathered in the evening for conversation ranging from Mozart's lonely genius to the irony of composers now dissecting Lohengrin half a century on. Cosima reflects on the day as a tranquil, industrious one suffused with a deep sense of communion between them.
January 13, 1881	205	Joukowsky's birthday provided occasion for Wagner's characteristic warmth, while the main business of the day was the arrival of veteran stage technician Karl Brandt to work through the practical demands of staging Parsifal. Abstract artistic vision gave way to concrete technical problems — wire rigs, transformation-scene timing, the mechanics of the spear — a shift Wagner greeted with both reluctance and relief. His enthusiasm for Gobineau's writing continued, and he lamented only discovering such an original mind so late in life.
January 14, 1881	378	Brandt and Joukowsky pressed on with staging deliberations while Wagner and Cosima escaped for a walk, reveling in the snow-covered dogs and a full moon Wagner described with characteristic wit. The evening turned to shared memories of Nibelungen production struggles and practical questions about Parsifal's final lighting effects. Wagner handled a presumptuous letter about the Leipzig Tristan production with precision, and when Cosima raised the Imitatio Christi he declared himself still firmly in the grip of art's devil.
January 15, 1881	110	Wagner worked through some physical discomfort, and the two walked in the palace gardens talking warmly about Brandt's productive visit. The evening was quietly domestic — Cosima read aloud from Gobineau's "Gamber-Ali" — and she noted with satisfaction that the committee had revised the Bülow fund language to honor Wagner's wish that it benefit his children.
January 16, 1881	568	Wagner surprised Cosima with her old fox fur refashioned in black velvet overnight, delighting in having pulled off the secret and chiding her for enduring the cold without complaint. Their walk, their discussions of history and art, and an evening at the piano exploring Bellini's long-breathed melodies all folded into a day of rare contentment. The two parted for the night with Wagner declaring his intention to live disgracefully beyond his allotted years so as to reclaim the time they had missed together.
January 17, 1881	503	Domestic irritants — bills, water supply troubles, a dispatched letter — put Wagner in a dark mood that even his friends' company could not lift, though he demonstrated at the piano how conductors habitually mishandle Mozart. Everything changed when Rubinstein played the opening movement of Beethoven's Hammerklavier Sonata, which transported Wagner into an extended rhapsody comparing it to a glimpse into the workshop of the Will itself, a depth beside which even Shakespeare seemed too entangled in worldly suffering. They ended the evening quietly noting that seventeen years had passed since they first came together.
January 18, 1881	384	Ear buzzing and catarrh plagued Wagner, but he worked and kept his humor, joking that he wished two simultaneous slaps would knock the cold out through his nose and reaffirming his ambition to reach ninety-four. Memories of Semper and Herwegh animated the coffee hour, and a walk in which Fidi's silhouette reminded Wagner of Liszt gave way to an evening of Gobineau and the boy's magic tricks. Wagner's private comment that he was supposedly looking forward to coaching singers for Parsifal carried a tone of weary irony about the practical labors still ahead.
January 19, 1881	533	Levi's arrival brought an evening of Loewe ballades and then Wagner's announcement, to the conductor's visible surprise, that Levi would lead Parsifal and be received beforehand with a ceremony of belonging. Levi's guarded expression sent the conversation into private territory, where Wagner and Cosima wrestled at length with questions of Jewish assimilation, Christian identity, and racial difference. Wagner recounted that when Levi had kissed his hand and they had embraced, he felt with unusual clarity the reality of racial separateness — combined, nonetheless, with genuine warmth — and concluded that a Jew of good will must always carry a melancholy fate in their midst.
January 20, 1881	705	Wagner slept peacefully and woke speaking tender words he was unaware of, but lunchtime brought digestive trouble and mild friction with Levi over the conductor's persistent gloom. A second hearing of the Hammerklavier's first movement produced the same ravishment as before, and Wagner mused over an unresolvable question of a note and spoke regretfully of an improved version of the Flying Dutchman ballade he had lost. Alone together afterward, Cosima told Wagner that knowing him had steadily deepened her religious understanding — that through him she had learned to follow the mystics and despise worldly distraction — and she described his speech and language as involuntary and ungoverned as color on a leaf.
January 21, 1881	539	Wagner began the day in low spirits, his finger painful and a letter from Batz rekindling irritation at having engaged with such people at all, though Cosima noted that her presence reliably restored his good humor. Their walk was animated by the dogs' exuberant greeting, which struck Cosima as evidence of Wagner's unbroken bond with nature, and Wagner's sympathy for Marke's stiff ear led him to reflect on the endless inventive demands Parsifal was making on him. The evening closed over maps and Gobineau, with Wagner holding forth on his conviction that throughout history it is invariably the most brutish peoples who end up stamping their paws over everyone else.
January 22, 1881	631	Despite being plagued by a painful finger that dampens his spirits, Wagner gradually recovers his humor over the course of the day, bolstered by a satisfying walk and productive work reaching a key moment in Parsifal's composition. The evening brings lively company, discussion of anti-Semitic politics and their outsider position in Bayreuth, and a meditation on the true meaning of freedom rooted in truthfulness. The gathering ends festively with champagne and laughter, and Cosima reflects on her complete, anxiety-free trust in whatever Richard chooses to do.
January 23, 1881	333	Wagner holds forth at breakfast on the sacredness of natural life and the folly of imagining a personal creator God, finding in Goethe a kindred reverence for nature's particulars. The afternoon brings news of improving royalties from Vienna and a reflective walk in the palace gardens that stirs memories of their more solitary days at Tribschen. The evening is spent in animated discussion of the anti-Semitic movement before settling into genuine delight over a re-reading of a Gobineau tale of love in Kandahar.
January 24, 1881	220	A restless night and bitter cold leave both Wagner and Cosima subdued, compounded by his irritation over a Leipzig theater's misreporting of performances, which his formidable memory catches immediately. The evening offers some intellectual stimulus through a newspaper article critiquing contemporary natural science, and Wagner mentions carrying various literary ideas in his mind. He also offers a characteristically nuanced defense of the painter Lenbach, distinguishing between the man's social awkwardness and the genuine artistic vision behind his portraits.
January 25, 1881	359	Wagner wakes from dreams of old quarrels with his first wife Minna and unresolved feelings about his children, though daylight restores his composure and he settles into work and a brisk winter walk. The household celebrates young Fidi's successful school examination and his graceful skating, and the evening is spent in agreeable company discussing letters from acquaintances about the Ring negotiations and the anti-Jewish movement. Conversation drifts warmly to personal memories of Heine and Halevy, and Wagner jokes about a photograph sent for his signature that he finds far too flattering.
January 26, 1881	330	The day opens with amusement over Wagner's sleep-talking about Cicero, which leads to a serious discussion of Roman civilization and his conviction that historical decadence is an incontrovertible reality. Fidi's account of an apprentice being cruelly bullied prompts grim reflections on the human appetite for tormenting the weak. The evening brings rich pleasure in Cervantes's story "El Licenciado Vidriera," whose blend of melancholy wisdom, worldly knowledge, and absurdist humor Wagner finds deeply congenial, along with renewed admiration for the first movement of Beethoven's Eroica.
January 27, 1881	382	Wagner begins the day with tender playfulness, imitating Siegfried's voice outside Cosima's bathroom door, and later confides that he is distracted by thinking of her — words so affecting that she retreats to her room to pray in gratitude. The afternoon includes approval of Joukowsky's sketch for the Grail temple and a cheerful interlude watching Fidi skate, while a letter from their daughter Lusch earns Wagner's spontaneous praise of her genius. The evening's reading of Gobineau is interrupted by a sobering telegram announcing that Professor Frege has returned Wagner's letters undelivered, and a long, serious discussion follows about how to proceed.
January 28, 1881	340	The troubling matter of the undelivered letters continues to weigh on the household, but Wagner deflects anxiety with a wry joke comparing their situation to a man who had no horse for a race, and finds his spirits lifted by a productive session on Parsifal. An evening with friends features Rubinstein performing Beethoven's Op. 106 Sonata, which prompts Wagner to question how much of it is genuinely Beethoven and Cosima to notice with mild alarm that the piece no longer moves her as deeply as it once did. Reminiscences of Liszt playing the same sonata in St. Gallen in 1856 give way to renewed anxious discussion of what steps to take regarding Hans.
January 29, 1881	474	A morning heavy with accumulated fatigue sends Cosima to visit a neighbor whose husband has been committed to an asylum, while Wagner attends to business correspondence about performance rights before joining Joukowsky for a walk. Over the course of the evening they finish Gobineau's story of the Lezghian dancer, deeply moved by its climax, and Wagner reflects on how dying peoples can still produce heroic women and connects this to Schopenhauer's theory of inherited intelligence. Conversation ranges further into the nature of guilt, the will's ceaseless desire from the moment of birth, and the political dimensions of the anti-Semitic movement, which Wagner regards as peculiarly and amusingly German in character.
January 30, 1881	447	Morning conversation returns to the idea that pure perception is free from sin, and Wagner distinguishes art as the transfiguration of perception from religion as the transfiguration of the will, finding in artistic engagement the most defensible form of human activity. Rubinstein's performance of Beethoven's A Minor Quartet prompts Wagner to reflect on how little the piece was understood in earlier times and how much he and Liszt contributed to disseminating Beethoven's late works, noting that imaginative laypeople often receive the music more openly than trained musicians. The sight of his daughter Loldi's shyness at supper leads him to meditations on Joan of Arc's terrible fate, the dreadfulness of history, and the role of the Catholic Church in shaping prejudices that once touched Cosima's own children.
January 31, 1881	372	Wagner recounts a vivid dream in which Cosima played the piano with mournful intensity before announcing she must leave with her father, a reverie of separation and sadness that sets an unsettled tone for the day. He works but is plagued by nerves and aching fingers, and the arrival of Hermann Levi with unedifying news from the theater world does little to lift the mood, though a long springlike walk with the dogs provides some relief. The evening finds a saving grace in a digression from an argument about a parlor game into an animated discussion of Hamlet, whose disintegration and incapacity for action Wagner reads as the condition of the modern man.
No diary entries found.