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

Showing entries for January 1883 (31 total)

Date	Word Count	Subject
January 1, 1883	135	On New Year's Day, despite his health problems and spasms, Richard Wagner joins Cosima at the Princess's house for a small ceremony and later attends a performance of Goldoni's Le Baruffe Chiozzotte, which delights them both. Though initially irritated that not everyone accompanied them to the theater, the performance restored his spirits entirely. Returning home, they read Goethe's account of the same play in his Italian Journey and found it surprisingly superficial.
January 2, 1883	185	Cosima's right eye suddenly afflicts her with a black ring, forcing her to stop writing and reading, while Wagner walks with her and enthusiastically holds forth on Persian history and praises a Moretto painting as one of the finest ever painted. At lunch, his jokes about civil marriages give way to gravity when news arrives of a friend's son's suicide. The evening passes with Wagner reading from Goethe's Italian Journey about Venice and remarking on a disturbing antisemitic court case reported in the newspaper.
January 3, 1883	182	Wagner receives a deeply moving letter from conductor Hermann Levi, but his father-in-law Franz Liszt's manner at breakfast makes a poor impression, leading to confusion and wounded feelings at lunch. In the afternoon, Wagner and Cosima pay a visit to their landlords, the Della Grazias, which prompts Wagner's musings on the Germanic origins of aristocracy everywhere. The evening ends unhappily when Liszt's behavior provokes Wagner's indignation and sparks a minor quarrel between him and Cosima.
January 4, 1883	349	Cosima receives reassuring news about her eye, while Wagner immerses himself in Persian history and writes a fine letter of condolence about a suicide, though he grows angry when Liszt dismisses his philosophical views at lunch. A visit from Countess Marie Donhoff turns unexpectedly pleasant when she speaks earnestly about idealistic values, temporarily winning over the usually critical Wagner. In the evening, alone with Cosima, Wagner ranges across Gobineau and Carlyle in lively discussion, though his mounting frustration with Liszt's presence continues to darken the household atmosphere.
January 5, 1883	292	Though irritated by the display of Makart's portrait and unwanted society visitors, Wagner warms to Countess Donhoff at lunch, and the evening brings an intimate conversation in which he delivers a passionate reflection on music as the transfiguration of passion—the one art directly connected with it. In a tender moment at supper, surrounded by guests, Wagner calls out to Cosima across the table: "I love you!" The day is marked by a contrast between his social irritability and these moments of deep emotional warmth.
January 6, 1883	306	A brisk walk to admire a relief and a gondola ride home provide brief pleasure, while letters from operatic associates bring welcome professional news, but Wagner's mood at lunch is heavy—he has grown weary of his houseguest and privately likens Liszt to King Lear. The evening turns literary as Eva prompts a reading from Shakespeare's All's Well That Ends Well, preceded by a somber discussion of Gambetta's death, which Wagner views as fortunate for France. Cosima is moved to hear Wagner murmuring half-asleep that she is "the best of all."
January 7, 1883	157	The morning brings a discussion of Gambetta and Wagner's satirical play Die Kapitulation, with Wagner lamenting that even Nietzsche failed to understand it due to a lack of imagination. After collecting royalties at the bank, Wagner spends a subdued afternoon but rallies in the evening, making witty remarks at dinner before reading Twelfth Night aloud in his characteristic style. The day reflects his oscillating moods, moving from reflection and taciturnity to irrepressible wit and literary pleasure.
January 8, 1883	198	On the birthday of Cosima's first husband Hans von Bülow, she learns he has been holding rehearsals—a reminder of the life left behind—while Wagner remains cheerfully absorbed in his correspondence with conductor Levi. After visiting the ailing Countess Donhoff, whose bedridden elegance Wagner finds dispiriting, the evening becomes unexpectedly communal as he reads from King Lear and Liszt's group quietly joins to listen. Cosima is deeply moved by the radiance in Wagner's face and the intertwined feelings of joy and sorrow it inspires in her.
January 9, 1883	148	Despite a good night's sleep, Wagner is in a deeply unsettled state all day, suffering a morning spasm and spending the afternoon and evening in mounting ill-humor, which finally erupts into anger over Liszt's disruptive habits and the cramped living quarters. Cosima can only soothe him through silent suffering, offering no words that might further inflame his mood. As a small aside, she notes his oddly critical opinion that Countess Donhoff's dark eyes and hair are "unwomanly."
January 10, 1883	368	Despite continuing health troubles and frustration over the cramped quarters and the letter he is struggling to write to the King, Wagner finds moments of warmth: he dances twice into the room when Liszt plays a scherzo, delighting their son Fidi, and supper passes in good cheer. The visiting Dr. Kurz diagnoses Wagner's condition as stomach neuralgia and offers reassurance that the timing of the spasms is a good sign, bringing some relief. Alone with Cosima, Wagner privately critiques Liszt's tempo choices and confides his longing to compose a symphony, asking where he will find the tranquility to do so.
January 11, 1883	392	Wagner's morning begins with an irreverent dream about God before he finishes his letter to the King and reacts with irritation to news of an impending visit from friend Gross. The afternoon brings a lively lunch about Mme Viardot and delight in young Siegfried's theatrical talent as he reads scenes from his own comedy. The evening culminates in a deeply moving reading of Hamlet with Cosima, who feels Wagner and Hamlet becoming spiritually inseparable through his voice and interpretation.
January 12, 1883	129	Wagner suffers severe spasms throughout the morning, lasting more than two hours, and is unable to eat anything all day. The arrival of Dr. Keppler at five o'clock brings a new treatment—massage—along with a promise of improvement within a month, which cheers Wagner considerably though Cosima harbors quieter doubts. That evening, the household discusses the impending departure of their friend Joukowsky to attend his father's centennial celebrations, persuading him with reluctance to make the journey.
January 13, 1883	263	After a good night and double massage, the day brings news from Munich requesting only ten performances in July, which initially angers Wagner before he accepts it, thinking of the example owed to his children. Franz Liszt departs, and the household shifts to celebrate Joukowsky's birthday, with Wagner making a speech and improvising a march theme as a gift. Alone in the evening, Wagner draws a parallel between Gobineau's portrait of Alexander the Great and his own character, while Cosima hears him quietly playing a melody "in the manner of an English folk song" from his room.
January 14, 1883	299	Massage continues to improve Wagner's health, and a comical mix-up with two competing doctors—whom Wagner had engaged simultaneously without realizing it—provides much laughter on a sirocco-bound, housebound day. In the evening Wagner sits at the piano and improvises flowing melodies, telling Cosima they constantly well up within him, and the two share a tender exchange about their future: "This is how we shall be—this is how we shall sound." A philosophical conversation about deathbed rituals follows, with Wagner attributing the dying person's need for a priest to a deep fear of hellfire.
January 15, 1883	299	After days of confinement, Wagner and Cosima take their first walk together, enjoying a brief separation—he shops while she visits Saint Mark's Basilica—before reuniting at Lavena's café. Their lunch conversation turns to Italian church music, with Wagner lamenting the decline of the simple grandeur he once heard in Naples, while the evening becomes a meditation on fame, which neither he nor Cosima finds particularly desirable. Wagner puzzles over why Franz Liszt did not abandon everything to be with his son when he got to know him.
January 16, 1883	359	A medical consultation reveals both Wagner and Cosima to be in surprisingly good health, prompting them to joke that neither will ever die—a moment of lightness on a rainy, housebound day. Wagner ranges widely across intellectual territory: reading pamphlets, reflecting on Napoleon's strange charisma, and critiquing the state of the Catholic church and modern French saints. The evening reaches a peak when he plays an intricate "Harlequin" improvisation at the piano, concluding with "Du lieber Augustin," and then reads aloud the opening scenes of Faust with unrestrained admiration, calling it purely German.
January 17, 1883	688	Wagner wakes still absorbed in Faust and spends the morning reading pamphlets before they embark on an open gondola ride through Venice's canals toward the Rialto, where Wagner is so captivated by the colorful street life that an approaching spasm passes almost unnoticed. The day brings a mix of the whimsical—musing on why Germans make the sun feminine—and the serious, as Wagner questions whether the Bayreuth Festival should be continued at all, regretting friendships lost with Nietzsche and Gersdorff. The evening concludes with an enthusiastic reading of Schiller's Don Carlos, which Wagner praises as a joy of youthful subtlety and mastery.
January 18, 1883	224	A late massage disrupts the household and a misguided decision to remove all fur coverings leaves everyone frozen, contributing to a lunch full of vexation that brings Cosima to tears. A long afternoon sleep restores Wagner, and the evening passes more pleasantly with another massage and a continued reading of Don Carlos, which he now finds delightful rather than overrated—particularly praising King Philip's soliloquy as Shakespearean in quality. He closes by playing the opening horn theme of Der Freischütz at the piano, reflecting on what that work once meant to him.
January 19, 1883	329	Wagner wakes in a cheerful mood and apologizes amusingly to his doctor for the disruption of the previous day's treatment, before a pleasant lunch and a social call on Count Bardi and his Austrian companions. News arrives of Prince Napoleon's arrest following a political manifesto, prompting lively discussion of French politics and Napoleon III's strange hold over European rulers. The evening offers a gondola ride to the moonlit Piazzetta before Wagner continues reading Don Carlos, concluding by playing the opening measures of Beethoven's Ninth and reflecting on its sublime naïveté.
January 20, 1883	374	The morning raises concern over the children's lives in isolation—particularly Eva's nervous irritability—while Cosima experiences a moment of transcendence alone in Saint Mark's Basilica, feeling as though she is "swimming in gold." Wagner recounts a dream in which he realized mid-climb that Cosima was actually supporting him, and reflects gently at lunch on not taking his vexed outbursts too seriously. A solo walk through the Cannaregio district inspires Wagner to jot down observations about the value of unhurried seeing, which he shares with Cosima in the evening along with a nuanced interpretation of the Queen's final words in Schiller's Don Carlos.
January 21, 1883	436	Wagner starts his preface to Heinrich von Stein's book—work that puts him in a good mood—before heading to Saint Mark's Square for an outdoor lunch, only to find Venice wrapped in thick fog with twenty thousand carnival revelers filling the piazza. Though the scene strikes him as sad, he reflects that a person who cannot seek closer contact with the masses is "not worth much," watching the masked procession with a mix of melancholy and engagement. Back home in the evening, a conversation with a perceptive visitor about the relationship between voice and orchestra prompts Wagner to sit at the piano and play scenes from his own works, but the exertion leaves him restless and distracted.
January 22, 1883	419	Tired from the previous day's overstimulation, Wagner needs quiet and seeks it in a brief visit to Saint Mark's Square before returning home, where the news of the King of Bavaria's order for a separate Parsifal performance in Munich causes fresh agitation. The evening is deliberately restrained—only Wagner, Cosima, and Joukowsky together—with Wagner reflecting on French political instability and Russia's need to heed Gobineau's ideas. He plays the graceful trio from Mozart's G Minor Symphony before pondering what constitutes perfection in art and concluding: "An ancient Greek statue."
January 23, 1883	365	A peaceful morning walk to the Piazzetta and back gives Wagner the occasion to praise Bach's fugues as uniquely capable of turning chaos into harmony, finding all other musical forms trivial by comparison. The day passes pleasantly with a cheerful lunch, two social calls, and continued reading of Gobineau's work, to which Wagner's admiration continues to deepen. The evening closes with a performance of the Pilgrims' Chorus and Shepherd's Song from Tannhäuser, after which Wagner remarks movingly that he still "owes the world Tannhäuser," then grows sorrowful recounting a story of an elephant cruelly tortured in Siam.
January 24, 1883	448	Wagner dismisses a proposal to stage the Ring cycle in Venice and turns to his preface for Stein's book, reading Cosima the beginning of his letter to Stein in words so moving she is brought to tears. A cold north wind prevents the usual outing, and the day is shadowed by concern over Lusch's illness, prompting a serious conversation with Dr. Keppler about the position of women in modern society. In the evening, Wagner muses on the influence of color and scent on his creative moods, the memory of the Bayreuth theatre's roof-raising ceremony, and a dangerous mountain-climbing misadventure with a friend that still makes them both laugh.
January 25, 1883	390	Wagner catches a cold that keeps them indoors, though he continues working on his preface and entertains the household by disguising himself in a visiting count's coat to comically "propose marriage" to the ailing Lusch. In the evening, Cosima is finally obliged to reveal the contents of a troubling letter from Herr von Bürkel, which agitates Wagner greatly and prompts him to consider assembling his own orchestra. His mood darkens further, but he redirects the conversation to Hamlet's "To be or not to be," insisting it must be delivered as pure brooding rather than philosophy, before admitting privately: "My works are there!"—implying the festival could be abandoned.
January 26, 1883	230	A calmer morning follows the previous evening's agitation, with Wagner debating between two possible titles for his essay on women and working productively on his preface. News about delaying the Munich performance until spring 1884 is unwelcome but somewhat relieves the immediate pressure, even as the gondola ride and lunch are dulled by Wagner's lingering indisposition. The quiet evening brings a letter from Heinrich von Stein that raises a consequential question for Siegfried Wagner's future education: should his guide be the loyal biographer Glasenapp or the gifted young thinker Stein?
January 27, 1883	158	Wagner recounts a dream of embarrassing exposure in a theater box before turning to his writing, joking that he is no longer capable of producing an article as long as Cosima's. His agitation persists through the day despite a trip to S. Moïsé, and the evening conversation—though mostly pleasant—is disrupted by an old slight from Munich that still stings. They close the night reading Goethe's "Dedication," which prompts Wagner to note again how little satisfaction lyric poetry gives him.
January 28, 1883	258	A restless night brought on by beer puts Wagner in a sour mood, though he laughs at a letter from Josef Rubinstein that inspires the aphorism "the best society thou find'st will show thee thou art a man among donkeys." In the afternoon, he reflects on what pleasure his completed works give him—not the re-reading of scores, which brings stagecraft worries, but the sight of an audience returning again and again. An incautious remark about the heating at Wahnfried briefly irritates Wagner before he settles into the evening with the final pages of Gobineau's history of the Persians.
January 29, 1883	290	Confined to bed with a cold, Cosima listens as Wagner reads aloud his newly finished preface for Stein's dialogues—a piece she finds genuinely fine—before he goes out and returns in good spirits from Saint Mark's Square. The afternoon brings massage and cheerful joking about the contrasting styles of Cosima's letters to different correspondents, while the evening is devoted to a warm reading of Act Four of Don Carlos, with a shared sense of the power of Schillerian idealism. Wagner also expresses strong opinions on modern women's fashion, wishing he had authority to make them dress differently.
January 30, 1883	619	Wagner goes out alone for the first time in a while and returns in high spirits from a walk through Venice's lively streets, having also bought Cosima a coffee service as a surprise, though he confesses he walks more freely without her because he is ashamed of the slowness his health forces on him. A subdued mood at dusk prompts reflection that this may be their last visit to Italy, though he cannot bear the thought of being shut up in the North. The evening passes with solo piano playing—Beethoven's Fourth and Ninth Symphonies—during which Wagner distinguishes the symphonies as world-epics from the chamber works as personal music, before imagining a new symphonic form in which themes emerge continuously from one another.
January 31, 1883	332	The morning brings anxious thoughts about the children, particularly Lusch's situation, and reflections on how the relationship with the King of Bavaria—once seeming to solve everything—has become a source of bitterness. Wagner spends a rainy day productively finishing his letter to Stein and taking solace in valerian drops that ease his spasms enough to allow him to work, while Cosima hears him improvising at the piano with "the blessed spirit of music stirring in him." The evening ends on a playful note as visitors arrive and Wagner closes the gathering with his favorite improvised Harlequin theater piece.
No diary entries found.