Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of July 12, 1881

Overview

The morning is warm and domestic, with Richard asking Daniela whether Hans might attend Parsifal and whether a meeting between the two men could be managed in the theater rather than the house. The evening gathers a circle of friends and produces a wide-ranging conversation in which Richard holds forth on French superficiality toward Germany, the nature of Russian openness, and the tragic pattern by which artists' early works outshine everything that follows — though he exempts Beethoven and Mozart from this fate. Richard, growing weary of entertaining the company, bluntly tells his guests they are boring, and the evening closes on his sharp observation that Goethe's *Faust* stands to *Werther* exactly as Goethe stands to himself.

Content

Tuesday, July 12:

A good night, also for R., and cozy breakfast in the pavilion with Lusch. R. asks her if she thinks her father would come to Parsifal and whether he would see him. R. feels a meeting would not be possible in the house, for what would be their words on parting? But perhaps in the theater.

Around lunchtime R. summons us with folk songs and we go off to the Feustels’ for a family meal. Strange feelings as we think of his first wife, and the completely different tone now prevailing there. R. gives drastic expression to these feelings as we drive home. In the evening friends Glasenapp, Forges, Wolz., Jouk.; with the last of these R. gets into a kind of dispute: someone says that Turgenev has immortalized our poor friend Pohl in one of his stories; R. says how ignorant the French and all the foreigners who follow them are about Germany; all they can ever bring up is sausages and pipes: “I am the first to complain about the Germans, but when I see such superficialities, then I feel like saying to them that Bismarck is quite right. And it is bad, because the French dominate the world with their article de Paris.” When Jouk. replies that the Germans are no less prejudiced against the Russians, R. replies: “But that is something quite different; in Russia everything can be seen easily, there is a certain barbaric grace of openness, whereas we are very difficult to understand. And what we know of the Russians we know from their writers, such as Turgenev and Gogol; whereas no writer now shows us as we are, and one can’t get to know us even through our best writers.”

We come to the subject of “The Pied Piper of Hamelin,” and R. says he has recommended the poem, yet it has happened here as with so many others: “First of all, in the urgency of youth, under the sign of Sirius, a person produces something, and then it gets worse and worse, nothing else succeeds.” He cites Halévy, above all Marschner, even Spontini, and also to a certain extent Weber, who, however, was hindered by illness: “Whereas with all the genuine fellows like Beethoven, things become more and more astonishing; it is quite impossible to say what Mozart, for instance, might not have produced.” He even cited Goethe with his Werther: “Except that Faust stands in relation to Werther exactly as Goethe does to Goethe.” The sketches for the stage properties spoil the mood, and finally R. tells our friends that they are boring, they expect him to entertain them. He gives each of us 5 thalers from the royalties he has received. Letters from G. Sand to my mother, which Daniela brought me, give me the impression that French society at that time was completely different from now. As regards German society, R. says one can only ask oneself whether there were more Jews then or now, or what they were like then compared with now. He asked whether I would ever expect to find similar letters from a German woman; I mention Frau v. Kalb: “Yes, she belongs to the previous century.” R. has orchestrated half a page.