Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of March 21, 1870

Overview

Forges’s letter renews the sense that Munich cannot manage Die Walkuere and that Cosima’s life is lived under a permanent threat. Wagner’s anxiety about the king gives way after work and a walk to a more settled, bourgeois mood, easing Cosima’s concern. Aunt Isa’s gifts, Hans’s photograph, worries over the children’s flattery, and As You Like It make the evening a mixture of pain, judgment, and theatrical pleasure.

Content

Monday, March 21:

Letter from Heinrich Porges, according to which they do not really know in Munich what to do about Die Walküre. How strange is my fate, which keeps me eternally under a threatening cloud! There is always something bad ahead which cannot be averted. “How do you think it will end between the King and me?” Thinking of Kant’s celebrated anecdote, I say, “That is something to be forgotten!” “Yes, if I had your fine equanimity,” then, jokingly, “You will certainly bring up the children to be saints—to the eldest you will give a pension, and the others must run around with piously pale expressions on their faces!”

After his work he says he is in a state of nerves, but after taking a walk he reports that he is in a good, comfortable, bourgeois mood, which relieves me very much. Arrival of presents and a letter from Aunt Isa; a photograph of Hans, which is enclosed, affects me very much. The tone of their aunt’s letter is not right, it sets out to flatter the children, and that can prove very harmful in the long run. In the evening As You Like It, in which we are above all struck by the immediacy of Shakespeare’s stage.