Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of June 21, 1880

Overview

At breakfast R. lamented modern music for its lack of melody, saying younger composers produce showy fragments instead of living form, and he managed another page of his article. Later at the belvedere he read Shakespeare with us, praised the play's historical depth, joked on the pianino with popular tunes, and ended the day recoiling from a fish exhibition as evidence that humans were meant for more than devouring one another.

Content

Monday, June 21:

At breakfast R. and I exchange impressions of the concerto yesterday. R. says, “Music has taken a bad turn; these young people have no idea how to write a melody, they just give us shavings, which they dress up to look like a lion’s mane and shake at us!” “It’s as if they avoid melodies, for fear of having perhaps stolen them from someone else.” “It is always as if the world is having to be created anew, so forceful, so pompous, while I am always looking for melody.” “In painting, one has the advantage of shape and form: when a painter paints a cock and does it badly, it still remains a cock, but here I do not even have the cock.”

R. writes a page of his article today. The necessity the Swiss, too, now feel to reform their army brings the whole wretched situation before our eyes.

In the afternoon R., the children, and I go to the belvedere, where we spread ourselves out; since Isolde has a volume of Shakespeare with her (H. VIII), R. reads to us the little scene between Katharine and Griffith about Cardinal Wolsey’s death, which grips us all; when I remark that, after the Queen has first received the news compassionately as a good Christian, she then, through reflection and absorption, comes to a truthful judgment, R. says, “And what a great historian Shakespeare looks like at this moment! An unfathomable being.”

Glorious moonlight in the evening, visit from Sgambati, but no music. At the conclusion of the evening R. reads to us Goethe’s letter to Schiller about Darwin’s poem, the description of its contents causing us much amusement.

Very early in the morning R. woke Herr v. Stein with “Steh nur auf” on the piano, a sign of his good mood; he says that the shrill tone of the pianino always tempts him to play popular, even vulgar things on it, including, at coffeetime, the “Egyptian March” from Moses. Looking at the Illustrirte Zeitung we feel something like horror over the fish exhibition, and R. says, “We would not feel this disgust if human beings had not been designed for something besides gobbling one another up.”