Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of March 17, 1881

Overview

Wagner wakes in high good humor, singing a students' drinking song in bed, and the lighthearted mood carries through a sunny afternoon walk accompanied by larks. The evening's session of Don Giovanni prompts him to reflect on his youthful musical ideals, and he performs the Stone Guest finale himself with such force that it leaves the company in admiring silence. His central insight is that it is the poet's dramatic imagination, not musical refinement alone, that gives such scenes their overwhelming power.

Content

Wednesday, March 16:

R. slept well, and bright sunshine persuades him to arrange a drive to the theater. In the morning he finishes his letter to the King. At lunch he waxes very merry about it, and our drive is also inordinately successful. The dog Faf, offspring of Marke, enchants us with his beauty. And letters to me from Count Gobineau, expressing a half-spoken wish to settle here, and from Herr Levi, affected by “Know Thyself,” have on the whole a pleasant effect on R.

In the evening he wants to play whist, after joking gaily about Balzac and other things: “La femme de trente ans commence à 40 ans” [“The woman of thirty begins at 40”]. He remarks that no Frenchwoman has ever interested him, and he asks where all these interesting Balzac women are. Among the women of other nations, whom he enumerates, he also finds few to remind him of these interesting figures. Over whist he recalls a certain party in Magdeburg who, in a state of complete drunkenness, took him to see his mistress! Today he bubbles over with humor as seldom before! He maintains that it is because he does not wish to make me speak, on account of my cough. His good spirits and his wit also extend to Hans, of whom, over coffee, he says quite simply that he is unbearable! Which, in my depressed state of mind on this subject, causes me great amusement. [These sentences concerning von Bülow obliterated in ink by an unknown hand.] But again and again it is Faf’s beauty which gladdens R. to think about. The fact that he did not recognize us reminds R. of Siegfried and Wotan!