Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of January 31, 1881

Overview

Wagner recounts a vivid dream in which Cosima played the piano with mournful intensity before announcing she must leave with her father, a reverie of separation and sadness that sets an unsettled tone for the day. He works but is plagued by nerves and aching fingers, and the arrival of Hermann Levi with unedifying news from the theater world does little to lift the mood, though a long springlike walk with the dogs provides some relief. The evening finds a saving grace in a digression from an argument about a parlor game into an animated discussion of Hamlet, whose disintegration and incapacity for action Wagner reads as the condition of the modern man.

Content

Monday, January 31:

R. tells me his dream: we were at home, but not in this house, in a salon; he was standing by the fireplace, and I, very melancholy, began to play the piano; he asked himself what it was, perhaps something by Chopin, but he almost dozed off; I gazed at him with an expression of mournful ecstasy, a look with which he is familiar, and went on playing, more and more sadly, like an improvisation; he approached me, touched me with his hand, saying: “Please stop,” and at the same time noticing that I was kneeling. “My father is leaving today, I must go with him.” “Oh, then I must also get ready.” He goes into his dressing room, wants to light the fire, but the matches will not ignite; trying hard, he notices one of the big dogs: “How did he get in here?” Then he wakes up.

After this R. does not have a very good day; he does in fact work, but complains of restlessness and nervousness, his fingers are hurting. Herr Levi returns from his journey, tells us all sorts of things about the theater world, not particularly edifying. R. talks with great satisfaction about Stein's article, and he is also content with the other contributions in this issue.

We go, R. and I, for a walk in the palace gardens; the air is springlike, very mild and pleasant, and we stroll around for a long time with the two dogs. But in the evening R. does not feel well, he is very nervous, and it can be regarded as a stroke of good fortune that our discussion of the game of hand-me-the-slate, and whether, with the words “Here stands your uncle,” one should really take the slate, leads us to Hamlet. R. decides against the slate, and says that everything in this is agitation, dawning madness, Hamlet the modern man, disintegrated and incapable of action, seeing the world for what it is.

We are glad to be alone together for a little while after our friends have gone, and R. complains of the state of nerves to which he is subject and also about his uneasy relationship with the Israelites, with whom one must always be so “exalted.”