Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of August 21, 1881

Overview

After a genuinely restful night, Richard sketches four verses of his poem and at lunch recalls the magnificent lines of the Gulf of Naples with obvious longing, drawing an unexpected comparison between Vesuvius and the character Marke—familiar yet strangely exotic. The newspaper prints a letter Liszt wrote about Richard in 1849, a candid admission of admiration shadowed by regret over their estrangement, which moves them both. Tenor Winkelmann's evening visit and performance spark a wide conversation about how the scale of modern theaters and shifting audience expectations have stripped away the artless naivete that Mozart's comic operas require.

Content

Sunday, August 21:

R. had a restful night, and he sketches the four verses of his poem. "I am lavish," he says gaily, after joking about the fact that, when one is lost for a rhyme and nothing comes to mind, "I write 5 verses."

At lunch he recalls the splendor of the Gulf of Naples and says that after seeing that, one cannot really be satisfied with anything else, on account of its magnificent lines; he compares Vesuvius to Marke - something belonging to us, familiar, yet exotic! The newspaper prints a nice letter written by my father about R. (1849): "Oh, what Liszt is - that he is a being hors de concours - this I know; I have only to tap my brain case to see him complete before me. But I deplore the fact that through bad influences we have become strangers to each other - or, rather, we are not really that, but we mean so little to each other."

In the afternoon, after we have been watching the dogs together, he comes upstairs and shows me the four verses. ... Oh, silence, silence! ... In the evening the tenor Herr Winkelmann, who had already presented himself during the afternoon, sings a few things. Our conversation turns to the difficulty of doing justice to works like Die Zauberflöte or Die Entführung in our gigantic modern theaters. R. also observes that the introduction of Shakespeare onto our stages sends us into the theater with different expectations. And singers have now lost the naïveté needed for Osmin, etc. R. says that he and other serious-minded people had even enjoyed Der Dorfbarbier - that would be impossible today. R. has advised me to study orchestral scores in order to appreciate fully the joys of musical lines.