Word: bulow
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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When this couple, so prodigious in their ambition, self-deception and passion, first fell in love, she was the wife of Hans von Billow, a great Wagner admirer who often conducted his work. For a few years Bulow tolerated the affair, even though it brought two Wagner babies into his household. One reason for the unusual arrangement was that all three wanted to keep the scandal from the young King Ludwig II of Bavaria, who was their adoring, idealistic patron. Finally in 1868, pregnant once again, Cosima left for Switzerland to live with Wagner, and here the diary begins...
...concert's representative of the nineteenth century was the Siegfried Idyll of Richard Wagner. This composer's propensity for sleeping with the wives of his benefactors is well known, and his scandalous affair with the wife of the distinguished conductor Hans von Bulow finally ended in her divorce and her marriage to Wagner in 1869. In celebration of that event, Wagner composed the Siegfried Idyll, which, in its tranquillity and relative simplicity, contrasts sharply with the stereotype of Wagnerian heaviness and turmoil. Unlike his operas, it is modestly scored, an intimate love poem which Wagner never meant to have published...