Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of March 16, 1881

Overview

Sunshine puts Wagner in unusually high spirits, and a drive to the theater flows into an evening of whist and wit in which he jokes freely about Balzac, French women, and the more colorful figures of his past — maintaining, with characteristic self-deprecation, that his good humor is simply to spare Cosima's ailing voice. Letters from Gobineau and Levi arrive to a generally pleasant reception, while the beauty of the dog Faf — a descendant of their beloved Marke — becomes an unexpected and recurring source of pure delight. The day has a playful, weightless quality that stands apart from the surrounding days' philosophical intensity.

Content

Tuesday, March 15:

R. slept well; a remedy from Dr. Landgraf has had a good effect. He writes to the King and in the evening reads part of his splendid letter to me. In the morning we come to our main topic, the world’s morality: “We philosophize too much,” he says with a laugh. Count Gobineau has sent us a piece about India for the Blätter. New details concerning the assassination are still coming in.

R. arranges a drive to the Eremitage. There is bright sunshine, but the wind is still very strong. R. says to me, “It was nicer last year!” In the evening friends Wolz. and Herr Rub. are with us. Concerning the assassination, R. says it is an example of stupidity; as a dramatist he is interested in the assassins, for if he were to treat the subject, he could not make them entirely uninteresting. There was madness on both sides, he says: two bombs of stupidity which burst against each other. The Tsar, who did not wish to have any contacts with the Liberals, leaving such matters to his son but not abdicating, as if events would wait! “Oh, the madness of rulers!” R. exclaims. And now his successor, who out of filial piety must hang, banish, and imprison, and cannot be humane. “You would need a genius in this post,” he says.

R. tells me that during the rehearsals in Paris Wesendonck said to him, “What utterly voluptuous sounds these are!” “I suppose he was afraid I had been dancing something like that in front of his wife,” R. says. And then he calls the passage with the Three Graces “the bit Wesendonck likes.” When our friends have gone and we are talking about various things, he tells me he once heard the following statement from an actor called Stein: “It is stupidity which ought to be punished-only stupidity.” At the time he had thought it very strange, but now it has come back to his mind.

A remark about Humperdinck and Rub. reminds us of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, and R. recalls the passage in which the King and Queen send them away, and we read the scene again. And, as always, with renewed amazement! Then we come back to Hans. R. feels offended when Lusch writes “my father.” It is being said that he cannot receive his children since he is not living alone. [These sentences concerning Hans von Bülow obliterated in ink by an unknown hand.]