Cosima's Diaries

Diary Entry of December 10, 1870

Overview

Fidi's choice of Plato from Wagner's library offers a comic domestic omen before letters, lessons, and Christmas shopping take over the day. Wagner tenderly meets Cosima in the dark so she will not return home on foot while Grane is ill. His later rage over his work and its earlier mishandling becomes Cosima's greatest trial because she cannot help him, and news of Heinz von Buelow's death adds personal grief.

Content

Saturday, December 10:

Fidi seeks out Plato for himself from his father’s library! Letter from Herr Wesendonck, to whom R. had sent his Beethoven. Work with the children and then Christmas shopping. R. comes to meet me in the darkness; he does not wish to let me return home on foot, has followed me, and ordered a carriage (Grane is ill)! In the evening he falls into a gloomy rage about his work and the deplorable things that have happened to the first parts of it. This is for me the great test, the greatest of all, because here I cannot help him! I go sadly to bed.

(Letter from Grandmama in London, reporting the death of Hans’s stepbrother Heinz von Bülow, who died at Châteauneuf; I weep a lot, for of course I knew the young man.)