Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of January 14, 1881

Overview

Brandt and Joukowsky pressed on with staging deliberations while Wagner and Cosima escaped for a walk, reveling in the snow-covered dogs and a full moon Wagner described with characteristic wit. The evening turned to shared memories of Nibelungen production struggles and practical questions about Parsifal's final lighting effects. Wagner handled a presumptuous letter about the Leipzig Tristan production with precision, and when Cosima raised the Imitatio Christi he declared himself still firmly in the grip of art's devil.

Content

Friday, January 14:

A good night, good work, and much Brandt: “This cold Brandt,” R. exclaims. Our old friend has been to the theater and pleases us with his delight at the way everything has been preserved. Maquettes are brought down so that he can show friend Jouk. what he wants.

In the afternoon, while the expert and the amateur are deliberating, R. and I go for a walk, watch Fidi tracing curves for the first time, delight in the two dogs, who look very funny in all the snow and come bounding toward us over the bridge. The cold is severe. R. takes delight in the full moon, standing very proudly in the sky “as if Gottlieb had put it there.” He tells us that during a theatrical performance a voice was suddenly heard saying, “Gottlieb, pull out the moon.” I, with a shawl over my head, am Dürer’s Saint Hubert. At lunch he toasted me as “our dear lady of Wahnfried”!

In the evening he has to write a letter to Herr Batz, who is again behaving in a most presumptuous way in connection with the Tristan production in Leipzig. Feustel admires the precision of his letter, but R. complains about having to cope with all these Neumann and Batz escapades.

In the evening many, many memories with friend Brandt of Nibelungen tribulations; R. also discusses various things with him, such as the lighting for the dove at the end, and laughingly says over and over again that it is noses to the grindstone when Brandt appears. And when earth but our love. And my whole day is a prayer that I may be worthy of it.

Added in margin: “In the evening R. talks in grateful praise of the King.”

When I talk to R. about Imitatio Christi and say I should be interested to know if it would appeal to him, he replies, “I am in the clutches of the Devil of art!” In the morning a letter from Lusch, received the previous evening and containing comments on the nature of worldly society, produced the remark that she will certainly never find a husband there. It makes us laugh heartily when, after I mention a friend of Stein’s (Delbrück) in a completely different connection, R. exclaims, “Delbrück, wouldn’t he do?”