Category: Cosima Wagner Diaries

Our conversation is as usual concerned with what we heard yesterday. I told R. that, listening to the B. sonata, I felt as if B. were making use of all possible forms—recitative, fugato, Italian canto, figuration—in order to express something inside him of which even the music itself was only…

Bonichen unwell. R. works out his endings and writes letters. Some calls in the evening and Beethoven’s Opus 109 and 110.

R. dreamed that he had another son, a little lad one year old with fair, curly hair, and R. was delighted with the way he was flourishing and how he could already look him straight in the eye. “This comes from the jumping,” R. says, for yesterday the children were…

The day of Daniel’s death. Visits with and without R., family dinner at the Feustels’. Visit from two architects from Prague, who have been sent to inquire from R. how to construct a concert hall. —  Letter from Marie Schl.: the sale in Berlin has brought in 10,000 thalers. —…

In the morning errands with Fidi, who believes he saw the Christkind. — Great concern on account of my two elder daughters, particularly Lusch. — Dismal acknowledgment of the powerlessness of education in the face of character. —  We talk a lot about Bismarck’s manner; at a grand soiree which…

Visit from the old Baroness Aufsess, the widow of Baron Hans v. Aufsess, who was choked to death by a German professor and a German official. R. remarks on this occasion how unimportant it is whether a face is beautiful or ugly; how much one enjoys looking into the by…