Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of August 23, 1881

Overview

The day opens with Richard charmed by archaic peasant terminology in a newspaper article, and he sets cheerfully to work on a new essay by drawing on his older writings. After a lively family excursion to the Fantaisie and an evening of music including excerpts from Rienzi, Richard's exacting standards surface as he grows weary of coaching the willing but limited tenor Winkelmann, feeling he is building with bricks rather than marble. The emotional summit of the day arrives when he plays the Parsifal Prelude with almost unbearable transcendence, and the night ends with a spontaneous quotation from Othello that spirals into an ardent reflection on Shakespeare's unmatched capacity for directness and depth.

Content

Tuesday, August 23:

A newspaper article about medieval peasants contains a poem in which the knight calls himself an Edelkunne; the expression pleases R. greatly, as does the fact that the peasant is called Baumann instead of Bauer. Then he begins his article and says gaily that he went through his old ones and is scribbling a new one from them! Friend Gross is with us at lunch, which brings some business talk, and afterward photographs are taken in the salon and in the garden. J. brings along the Grail's chalice, and it is accepted by R. Telegram after telegram arrives on account of Seidl, who, enchained by Frau [Reicher-]Kindermann, is reluctant to come, which seems to me to mean that we must dispense with him.

We drive to the Fantaisie, very nice, the children going with their friends to the Schweizerei and then through the village, R. and I by a short path to Dommayer's to await the rest of the company. Gay spirits. In the evening there is Rienzi's recitative and Rienzi and the Cardinal, followed by Fanget an and Am stillen Herd!

As we are going into the garden in the afternoon, R. recalls the beginning of Henry V and exclaims: "How utterly and incomparably inexplicable Shakespeare is! The way he allows the death of Falstaff to be related by a boy, who then dies a heroic death! And how the ground is prepared, as it were, for the subsequent shallowness of the King, as revealed in the French wooing - all of it unspoken, but it is all there. Nowhere else can one get to know the world as one can through him."

Then he coaches Herr Winkelmann, who proves teachable; but R., as he tells me, is very tired of always having to begin again from the beginning and having to work with bricks instead of marble blocks. Our lunch is somewhat subdued because of his weariness; over coffee the subject of race comes up again, and R. says he is writing his article with Gob. in mind. He takes a rest and then calls me into the garden, where we again get much amusement from the family life of the dogs. In the evening he plays the Parsifal sketch in an indescribable way - almost too much rapture! As we go to bed, he calls out to me, like Othello, "And when I love thee not, chaos is come again!" That leads him back to Shakespeare, and he says others always seem to skirt a subject, whereas he is always so direct.