Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of March 2, 1870

Overview

Beautiful weather and games with the children contrast with Cosima’s inward absorption in Wagner’s previous reflections on Lohengrin. Wagner works and later plays the Wala awakening scene for Forges, keeping the Nibelung world alive in the household. Reports that the Vienna Meistersinger was poorly performed and signs of Semper’s unreliability temper any satisfaction from the work’s success.

Content

Wednesday, March 2:

Weather still splendid, I play at hoop bowling with the children. Then I write to Countess Krockow, R. works. He thinks I am sad and melancholy, whereas it is only that the things he told me yesterday about Lohengrin affected me deeply and are still echoing in my mind.

After lunch he plays Porges the scene of the Wala’s awakening by Wotan. A letter from Porges’s brother Fritz, saying that the performance in Vienna was a quite execrable one. Yesterday P. told me several things about Semper in Vienna, which showed me that he has been conducting himself there in just such a childishly unreliable way as toward us in Munich.