Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of January 12, 1878

Overview

Richard spends the morning wrestling with a single modulation in Amfortas’s Lament and mockingly calls himself an idiotic composer even as the work advances. Cold weather and concern for Fidi’s damp room shape the household, and the evening turns from the history of the Arabs to amused ridicule of Spohr’s recitatives.

Content

Saturday, January 12:

Around lunchtime R. plays me what he has composed of Amfortas's Lament; the modulation on the words "nach ihm" ["after him"] occupied him the whole morning. Talking about it at lunch, he says, "I sit there, looking at your portrait, [illegible word], I am an idiotic composer, it's all such an effort."

Very cold weather. Worry about Fidi, whose room has become damp; we move him to the nursery. In the evening the history of the Arabs. Then R. sings us some of the recitatives from Jessonda, in which the "interchange of feeling" and similar absurdities make us laugh a lot. "Such things never occur with French composers," says R.