Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of February 12, 1870

Overview

Lusch’s renewed illness alarms Cosima and interrupts the children’s lessons, but Nietzsche’s arrival shifts the day toward conversation and music. Wagner responds to Nietzsche’s ideas about Mozart by rejecting the notion that Mozart merely invented musical intrigue. For him, Mozart transforms clever theatrical maneuvering into melodic humanity, replacing calculation with suffering and feeling.

Content

Saturday, February 12:

Lusch ill again, which alarms me very much. Abandoned lessons. In the afternoon, as we are playing Beethoven symphonies in the old piano-duet arrangements, Prof. Nietzsche arrives. Lengthy conversation about his lecture. Then R. plays us passages from Mozart’s Entführung and Figaro—he likes the old Simrock editions. When Prof. N. remarks that Mozart is said to have invented the music of intrigue, R. replies that, on the contrary, he resolved intrigue in melody. One has only to compare Beaumarchais’s (incidentally excellent) play with Mozart’s opera to see that the former contains cunning, clever, and calculating people who deal and talk wittily with one another, while in Mozart they are transfigured, suffering, sorrowing human beings.