Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of November 27, 1881

Overview

A tender dream about Liszt singing Die Meistersinger and embracing Richard set a strangely moving tone for the day, though reflections soon widened toward solitude, Minna, and the uneasy comfort of past poverty. Letters about the Bayreuther Blaetter and broader disappointments in assistance and understanding drove Richard into exaggerated fantasies of selling Wahnfried and settling permanently in Palermo. By evening his thoughts had turned from exile to Greek pronunciation and the terrible force he felt in the old cry of aia.

Content

Sunday, November 27:

R. had such a pleasant dream about my father that it almost worries him. My father sang something from Die Meistersinger more beautifully than anything R. had ever heard, and afterward they embraced and gazed deeply into each other’s eyes, as in the most intense outpouring of friendship. Sulzer was also present, and he had with him an album containing illustrations from Die Meistersinger: “I should never have expected that from you,” R. told him.

At breakfast I see a woman having breakfast on the terrace, and I tell R. I can imagine such a solitary, meditative woman being happy, but not a man. R. says: “What do you mean? The times of solitariness were my best - Lucerne, Venice.” That leads us to Minna and her sufferings, since she could find no sort of pleasure and enjoyment in R.’s company, but only anxiety and fears of complete estrangement, after poverty had brought them close to each other - for instance, when a little money had been earned, a kind of gaiety was achieved.

I take my first stroll through the town and talk at lunch about our impressions. Etna leads R. to Hekla and Iceland and the life of the Vikings there. A letter from friend Wolz. about the B. Natter arouses R.’s displeasure, and he bemoans all he has encountered in the way of assistance and understanding. [This last sentence obliterated in ink by an unknown hand; see notes.] He says he will sell Wahnfried, hand over the performances of Parsifal to Neumann, settle down here. “Oh, Solon, Solon, Niemann!” he exclaims (since Niemann prophesied that our gravestone would one day be inscribed “Here lies Meyer Cohn.”)

[Added in margin: “He also thinks of the King, having read that the King has commissioned some plays about L[ouis] XV and is paying 2,000 marks each for them, since they will not be done publicly.”] He is very tired and run down. In the evening he talks to Herr Türk about the modern pronunciation of ai in Greek: he himself says a, but now it is e - since when? And for him the cry a corresponds to the word “Weh” [“woe”], and there is something terrible about “Aiaia,” which he has now lost through the new pronunciation.