On Reading Cosima Wagner's Diaries

Abstract

n 1853 Cosima Liszt, second child of Franz Liszt and the Countess Marie d'Agoult, met an up-and-coming German composer who was in Paris to promote the production of one of his works at the Paris Opera. Richard Wagner was forty, Cosima seventeen. Their second meeting took place nine years later. Cosima was now married to Wagner's friend, protege and leading interpreter, the conductor Hans von Billow; Wagner was still married to Minna Planer. The von Biilows had two daughters, the Wagners were childless., The subsequent history of the relationship between Cosima and Richard was documented by the participants themselves with considerable thoroughness. They avowed their love for each other on November 28, 1863, and officially became lovers in June, 1864. Isolde, Wagner's firstborn, appeared the following April. When Wagner moved to the Villa Tribschen (or Triebschen) in Switzerland in 1865, Cosima helped him set up house, visited him a number of times and bore their second child, Eva, there in 1867. Finally, to the scandalized astonishment of all Europe, Cosima, pregnant again, left von Biilow and, on November 16, 1868, went to live with the master. The inauguration of a daily journal and the birth of a son followed shortly, on January 1 and June 6, 1869, respectively. Cosima and Richard had fourteen years together. Von Biilow, amazingly accommodating through all this, gave her a divorce enabling her to marry Richard and get custody of the daughters, Daniela and Blandine. It should not be thought that these affairs represent any sort of advanced attitudes about marriage and the place of women in society. Cosima believed all her life that, in fulfilling a higher mission, she had