Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of April 7, 1870

Overview

Cosima appears before Wagner with Fidi, and the previous night’s Symposium reading becomes the day’s governing inspiration. Wagner completes the Oath music and explains the technical challenge of making it continuous yet ominously significant, like a gathering thundercloud. Family discipline, a child’s rudeness from outside the household, first violets, and Xenophon give the day a moral and classical frame around creative satisfaction.

Content

Thursday, April 7:

To Richard in the morning with Fidi in my arms. “To create beauty from beauty,” R. cries out to me. The Symposium forms the main topic of our conversation. R. works and is pleased in the evening; he has completed the Oath and is satisfied. “The difficulty,” he says, “was to avoid bringing a new tempo into the scene, everything had to be continuous, but all the same it had to seem significant, like a heavy thundercloud.” He has succeeded wonderfully. “Dear indispensability,” he called me today—how sweet it is for me to hear what I already know: that he loves me!

Family lunch. Lulu touchy, has to be punished. In the evening great rudeness from the Am Rhyn boy toward the children, I instruct the children to show humility toward good, fearsome pride toward evil. In the evening Xenophon’s Memorabilia. (Letter from Claire.) The first violets.