Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of April 9, 1881

Overview

A farewell lunch for the Staff family draws out Richard's brilliant wit and gaiety, and a newspaper image of the assassinated Tsar prompts him to reflect with genuine sympathy on the peace that death must have brought so frightened a man, contrasting this with what he sees as the Emperor's trivial response. Despite the bitter wind keeping them mostly indoors, the evening is animated by a spirited reading of Aristophanes's The Frogs, which Richard celebrates as a truer form of comedy than the modern kind, rooted in the tension between the divine and the animal in human nature. The night ends in a tender, quietly philosophical exchange between husband and wife as they retire.

Content

Saturday, April 9:

R. had a somewhat restless night, but not a bad one, and at the farewell lunch we hold for the Staff family he is bubbling over with gaiety and such wit that I can only regret not being able to repeat it all here. The wind is still very piercing, and we do not go for a walk, R. just for a short while in the garden. The Fliegende Blätter, with its rules for soldiers, gave us a lot of amusement yesterday, and again this evening. The I. Z. publishes a picture of the murdered Tsar, and in connection with it R. makes the sublime remark that he can imagine what a great feeling of peace must descend on such a frightened person at the moment of death: “The pacification of the Will - certainly no awareness of it, but in the words ‘to die in the palace’ there lies submission, and I can imagine a great feeling of release: ‘No more worries now!’ Whereas in our Emperor I see something trivial following the assassination; immediately after the attempt listening again to reports about this regiment and that regiment.”

At the conclusion of the evening R. reads aloud the first scenes from Aristophanes’s The Frogs, to our great amusement. R. sees it all before him, the people, the poet, the actors, and he delights in its freedom and its genius. Afterward he points out to me how much more genuine this kind of comedy is, however difficult for women’s ears in its bluntness, than our own kind, which shows human beings only as they seem, their positions and other things of that sort. Whereas this turns its attention to the generic animality of the human being, shows it in conflict with his qualities as a god, and this, in the middle of a ceremony in honor of this very god, with all the invocations of his priests who are sitting there, must have produced inimitable comic effects. Cervantes had sought to do the same with Don Quixote and Sancho Panza.

When we are in bed and I think of Isolde’s birth, I ask R. to bless me, so that I may become good - “What am I supposed to say?” he replies. “Goodness does not need to be good.”