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 March 1881 (30 total)

Date	Word Count	Subject
March 1, 1881	494	The day begins with unusual gaiety, with Richard pausing to marvel at the mouth as an instrument of speech before the afternoon brings news of Lohengrin's success and a chest spasm during a windy walk. He resurfaces from his siesta to announce — with some tenderness — that "a son has arrived," meaning a newly completed passage of music, and reflects with regret that daily pressures prevent him from fully savoring his happiness. The evening turns to Parsifal — Gurnemanz's first narration read aloud as a fitting way to mark Shrovetide — and closes with Richard confessing that his own name, glimpsed in a mirror, feels entirely alien to him, except when spoken by Cosima.
March 2, 1881	141	A bright, sun-warmed day finds Richard working at his score despite ongoing pain in his fingers, which the doctor visits but cannot meaningfully relieve. Their walk through the waterlogged palace gardens is more slog than pleasure, and when Richard comes upstairs singing the C Minor Symphony before supper he is deflated by finding an unexpected visitor with Cosima, which triggers another chest spasm. The evening turns literary — a first act of Calderón's La dama duende followed by leisurely browsing of a book on India — a quiet, cultured close to a day marked by small frustrations.
March 3, 1881	600	A lively day at Wahnfried filled with wide-ranging intellectual conversation, as Wagner and Cosima move from Indian literature and Upanishadic philosophy to the Boer War and the symbolism in Wagner's own dramatic works. A pleasant afternoon walk to the Eremitage yields warmth and humor, including a charming anecdote about their dog Marke anxiously watching for Cosima's return. The evening deepens into comparative religion, with Cosima arguing that Christianity surpasses Brahmanism by leading humanity away from the world rather than merely organizing it—a view Wagner comes to share.
March 4, 1881	265	Wagner begins the day in an irritable mood, his composing interrupted by aching fingers and a broken plumbing system, and his frustration boils over during a walk when a palace keeper shouts at young Fidi, triggering chest spasms. He channels his annoyance into a letter of complaint to the palace gardener and gradually recovers his equilibrium by evening. The day closes pleasantly with the couple reading the final acts of Calderón's La dama duende together.
March 5, 1881	257	Wagner opens the morning with a philosophical reflection on the central problem of existence as the very heart of Christianity, leading to a sustained comparison with Brahmanism, which he finds lacking in genuine benevolence. Despite rainy weather they walk in the palace gardens, and the evening brings musical pleasure as Wagner sings a deeply moving folk song and then performs passages from Die Meistersinger, marveling at the richness he had achieved in his own work. Alone together, the couple lose themselves in far-reaching discussions of religion and philosophy, though Wagner resists the idea that their daughter Loldi's contemplative nature signals a true withdrawal from the world.
March 6, 1881	96	After a good night's rest interrupted only by early crowing cocks, Wagner composes four new minutes of music for Parsifal despite stormy weather. The couple dines with friends, where Wagner speaks with great feeling about the Boer War and his indignation at European indifference to the Boers' struggle against British forces. The evening passes quietly in conversation.
March 7, 1881	123	Cosima spends the day confined to her chaise longue with a lost voice, while Wagner joins her upstairs for coffee and teases her affectionately about being a "quarrelsome woman." Her thoughts are preoccupied with worry over their daughter Lusch's character, and both she and Wagner write to the girl after Cosima shares troubling news from a family friend. The evening ends with a brief discussion of Bismarck before Wagner and Joukowsky retreat downstairs to examine new illustrations on Indian subjects.
March 8, 1881	408	The day centers on animated comparisons between European and Asian culture, with Wagner contrasting the heavy scholasticism of the German scholar Pott with the elegant, freewheeling brilliance of Gobineau, and declaring himself willingly parted from the German Reich and world order alike. Frustration with Joukowsky's still-unsatisfactory Magic Garden sketch gives way to rapture over Indian art and architecture, while a hurricane cuts short Wagner's walk but not his spirits. The evening's reading of a classical Indian play moves the household profoundly, prompting Wagner and Cosima to rank it above contemporary European drama without hesitation.
March 9, 1881	304	Morning conversation returns to the Indian play admired the night before, and lunchtime brings lightness when Cosima shares an anecdote about the Latin tutor's embarrassment at a sentence about Roman slaves, drawing Wagner's laughter. Bad weather keeps them indoors, and the evening is devoted to a moving review of the third act of Tannhäuser, in which Wagner takes particular pride in the austere simplicity of the "Prayer," written when he was young and technically underprepared yet possessed of remarkable self-assurance. As they retire for the night, Wagner tells Cosima that every bar of his new music is composed with her in mind.
March 10, 1881	191	Cosima oversleeps after a poor night, and Wagner comes to tease her before unveiling to her the new incidental music he has completed—a moment made all the more vivid by a dream she had the previous day in which she heard him playing the arrival scene from Tristan with such passion that she cried out. Friend Feustel joins them for dinner, and bad weather again keeps Wagner from going out. The evening is spent at work and in reading, with Wagner expressing both vexation at theatrical schemes in Berlin and genuine warmth toward the Chileans.
March 11, 1881	286	Wagner begins the day in good spirits at his composition desk but is soon beset by persistent abdominal pain, leading to a conversation about Indian karmic teaching and the consolation it offered even to those of lowest social standing. Joukowsky's continuing failure to render the Magic Garden satisfactorily frustrates Wagner, who takes what exercise he can on the railway station platform in lieu of a proper walk. The evening brings unexpected tenderness when, late at night, the couple hears their daughters Isolde and Eva singing Wagner's own song to themselves in bed—a moment that unexpectedly turns the conversation toward the painful subject of Hans von Bülow.
March 12, 1881	78	Despite a difficult night of severe abdominal suffering, Wagner presses on with his composition, timing his new three-minute piece with watch in hand as if to impose order on his discomfort. His tenderness breaks through when he ventures into the garden and brings Cosima the season's first snowdrops, a small but deeply cherished gesture that she preserves between the diary's pages. The evening with their friend Wolzogen ranges freely across cosmogony, Indian philosophy, and Christian wisdom.
March 13, 1881	330	Wagner's Sunday is marked by physical ailment and morning irritability, but lifts toward evening as Rubinstein performs the Paris Tannhäuser and Wagner reflects warmly on the mysterious expressive power of his own early overture, ending the night in tender intimacy with Cosima. Monday brings the jarring news of the Tsar's assassination, which Wagner receives with philosophical composure rather than shock, musing on the mutual foolishness of rulers and revolutionaries while Cosima is genuinely shaken. The two days move from domestic suffering to world-historical reckoning, with intellectual vitality and quiet affection threading through both.
March 15, 1881	198	After a restful night, Wagner writes to the King and gathers with friends to debate the Tsar's assassination, framing it as a collision of two equally catastrophic stupidities that exposed the fatal limitations of autocratic rule. Rubinstein's performance of the Venusberg music draws out a comic anecdote about Wesendonck during the Paris rehearsals, lightening the political mood with personal memory. The evening closes on lively literary discussion and a quietly charged undercurrent surrounding Hans von Bülow, whose domestic situation remains a source of tension.
March 16, 1881	409	Sunshine puts Wagner in unusually high spirits, and a drive to the theater flows into an evening of whist and wit in which he jokes freely about Balzac, French women, and the more colorful figures of his past — maintaining, with characteristic self-deprecation, that his good humor is simply to spare Cosima's ailing voice. Letters from Gobineau and Levi arrive to a generally pleasant reception, while the beauty of the dog Faf — a descendant of their beloved Marke — becomes an unexpected and recurring source of pure delight. The day has a playful, weightless quality that stands apart from the surrounding days' philosophical intensity.
March 17, 1881	280	Wagner wakes in high good humor, singing a students' drinking song in bed, and the lighthearted mood carries through a sunny afternoon walk accompanied by larks. The evening's session of Don Giovanni prompts him to reflect on his youthful musical ideals, and he performs the Stone Guest finale himself with such force that it leaves the company in admiring silence. His central insight is that it is the poet's dramatic imagination, not musical refinement alone, that gives such scenes their overwhelming power.
March 18, 1881	187	Saint-Saëns's public insinuation that Wagner craves Parisian success irritates him throughout the day, whether the remark was sincere condescension or deliberate obstruction. Wider reading — including a pamphlet on vivisection and Gobineau's new book, which he finds less nourishing than Jacolliot's — darkens his mood and draws out bleak reflections on the cruelty woven into ordinary life. An evening of friends and Tannhäuser music restores warmth, and the couple close the night savoring their simple pleasure in each other's company.
March 19, 1881	213	Wagner continues to turn over Saint-Saëns's motives in his mind, and after a sheltered walk in the palace gardens the evening takes a decisive literary turn as he reads aloud from Calderón's El médico de su honra. The play's portrait of jealousy and violated honor captivates both, and Wagner argues passionately that the protagonist's terrible logic is entirely comprehensible from within. A playful riddle at lunch — with Cosima as its answer, named for her silver and golden hair — gives the day an intimate, affectionate undertone.
March 20, 1881	176	Boni's birthday is marked by Wagner improvising on Elisabeth's theme as gifts are presented, though the festive mood is tempered by Evi's illness and the fatigue carried over from the previous night's late reading. The day opens outward into remarkably wide-ranging reflection: Wagner recalls his first marriage to Minna with a mixture of horror and candor, revisits the comparative merits of Weber and Mozart with the earnestness of a lifelong obsession, and expresses his persistent longing to write symphonies. The evening closes on a sweeping cosmological reverie in which Wagner imagines the birth of the universe as driven by fear rather than desire, and muses on how moral significance is the only thing that lifts existence above indifference.
March 21, 1881	442	A domestic comedy opens the day when Cosima overhears Wagner soliloquizing in his dressing room, spinning an elaborate imagined romance about their absent doctor — which both find hilarious once unraveled. The evening guest Wolzogen draws Wagner into broader meditations on the Ring's meaning, Russian politics, and the inadequacy of his texts' critical reception, before the night closes on a moment of deep spiritual intimacy in which both feel their bond as something discovered across lifetimes rather than merely formed in this one. Wagner rounds off the day by proudly showing Cosima page 80 of the Parsifal score, the tangible proof of his labor.
March 22, 1881	514	A late-season snowfall sets a paradoxical tone as Wagner moves through a quiet morning of reading and composition, with a brief Shakespearean exchange sparked by Cosima's compliment establishing a playful mood. The afternoon brings a technical meeting with stage machinist Brandt and the Bruckner brothers, and afterward Wagner and Cosima share private laughter over the eccentricities of the painters, with Cosima quietly proud to have eased the social burden for Wagner. A wry aside about Rubinstein and Humperdinck's rendition of the Flower Maidens provides a final comic flourish.
March 23, 1881	202	Wagner's exuberance at lunch — so striking that Brandt says he has not seen it since the Tribschen years — carries through a walk in the palace gardens where rehearsal memories, spring snow, and the shadow of the Tsar's fate all mingle in a mood Wagner himself names "smiling through tears." The evening turns literary as Wagner reads Hamlet aloud with an interpretive intensity that leaves everyone stunned, framing the Prince as the first purely modern consciousness to face death stripped of religious consolation. His final reflection recasts "To be or not to be" not as a meditation on despair but on reincarnation, giving the whole day a quietly transcendent close.
March 24, 1881	198	Wagner and Cosima clash sharply over the Russian nihilists, with Cosima arguing the conspirators have no moral right to speak for the peasants while Wagner counters that political legitimacy is simply a matter of force, not principle. The evening turns to Brahmanism after Cosima's afternoon reading, leading to a shared exploration of the Oupnekhat on the subject of death. Wagner also recounts unsettling memories of his brother-in-law's brutal treatment of Cossacks, reflecting on how little Russian society could have changed.
March 25, 1881	204	Morning conversation compares Brahmanism and Christianity, with Wagner ultimately elevating Christianity as the religion of suffering over Brahmanism's appeal to the intellect, while Cosima draws a connection between Gobineau's account of the Hunnish invasion and the destructive spirit of the nihilist movement. The afternoon includes a review of costume sketches and a productive compositional session, followed by an evening of Mozart's Die Entführung aus dem Serail that delights everyone. Wagner grows reflective about Mozart's courtship of his wife, comparing it wistfully to his own earlier relationship with Minna Planer, which he says bore no comparable flowering.
March 26, 1881	96	Gobineau's chapter on civilization draws Wagner's enthusiastic praise, and the afternoon walk prompts a characteristically wide-ranging conversation between the couple on Hamlet, a subject they return to endlessly. The evening is spent in Schopenhauer, reading the preface to Will in Nature, while Wagner's recurring gout troubles his toe. He remarks archly that Jewish financiers are now the true patrons sustaining European monarchies.
March 27, 1881	202	With two children ill and domestic tensions running high over difficulties reaching Hans, Wagner gradually regains his humor over coffee, articulating his favorite maxim about trusting authority in domains beyond his own expertise while relying on his own instincts where he has mastery. The afternoon brings a windswept walk and wistful thoughts about Italy, with the couple weighing whether to abandon Wahnfried entirely rather than see it fall into impersonal hands. The evening continues with Schopenhauer's Will in Nature, preceded by Wagner improvising at the piano, something he says he always finds genuinely pleasurable.
March 28, 1881	270	A radiant spring day draws Wagner into the garden and then out on a long walk amid the song of larks, provoking both delight at nature's vitality and indignation at humans who think only of consuming such creatures. Back at work on his score, Wagner spends the evening with a visitor and waxes philosophical about music's supremacy over all other arts, moved by what a single triad conveys—something he likens to Brahma returning to himself. He ends the evening with tender, almost ecstatic expressions of happiness directed at Cosima.
March 29, 1881	278	A spring outing to the Fantaisie is followed by an evening devoted to Beethoven, with Wagner guiding the group through the Battle of Vittoria and then the incidental music for Egmont, praising above all the scene of Klärchen's death for its unflinching emotional truthfulness. Wagner reflects that such music, written to serve a dramatic text, tends to be swallowed up and lost in stage performances, and proposes it deserves an intimate salon setting instead. The evening closes with Wagner's exuberant declaration that musicians are like prussic acid—once the music begins, nothing else in the world has any claim.
March 30, 1881	201	Wagner is in a teasing mood over a trivial incident involving a piece of Meissen china, but his good humor gives way to chest spasms brought on by the change in weather, making the walk in the palace gardens unrewarding. Over lunch he reflects on Gobineau's blind spot regarding the Germans, arguing that while Germans present themselves poorly to the world, they alone are capable of producing truly universal and unprejudiced minds. The evening is shadowed by vexation over a letter from a theater director and by the considerable difficulty Wagner faced completing page 88 of the Parsifal score.
March 31, 1881	243	After a restless night spent reading Gobineau, Wagner works through the morning while concern grows over young Friedel's persistent hoarseness, and a walk in the gardens offers some relief through the song of a blackbird. Wagner pays a visit to his son Fidi but feels awkward and self-conscious in the attempt, later confessing to Cosima that he did not know how to reach the boy naturally. The evening passes with costume research, a hand of whist, and Wagner dictating the choral singer assignments for conductor Levi, punctuated by a flash of creative agitation when he leapt mid-meal to erase something from his score.
No diary entries found.