Word: cosima
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...garden, the imposing grave of Richard and his wife Cosima is unmarked. Who else could be buried here, after all? After a day of failing to share the passion, I head back to my pension with a sense of disgust. The connection between Wagner’s son and the Nazis is particularly appalling, and makes me discount the whole musical phenomenon as folly, an incomprehensible collective mistake...
...Festspielhaus, I remember Sonja and Gerlinde. By now, the pension will be buzzing with the cast and crew members. As Sonja serves their beers, she will collect all the latest intelligence about what’s up on the Festspielhaus hill. I smile. I wish I were back where Cosima and Richard are household names...
...still more than capable of running a one-man show. He says the next boss may not be a Wagner at all, but he will probably choose his second wife, Gudrun, 50, formerly a festival secretary. That solution would follow tradition. When the composer died, his wife Cosima succeeded him for 23 years, then handed control to her son Siegfried. After he died in 1930, his widow Winifred continued in his place until after the war, when, publicly disgraced for her idolatry of the Nazis, she relinquished the festival in favor of Wieland and Wolfgang. Will there be a fight...
...sleepy West German city is a memorable event in the world of music. It was here that Richard Wagner, music's great megalomaniac, built an acoustically perfect theater to house his revolutionary music dramas; here that he produced the first Ring cycle in 1876; here that Wagner, his wife Cosima and his father-in-law Franz Liszt are buried; here that Wagner's grandson Wolfgang keeps alive the sacred flame. To Wagner lovers, Bayreuth is a holy place, the Ring a sacred ritual and the Festspielhaus a shrine...
Perhaps. But eccentricity often accompanies creativity, even genius. Brahms frequented prostitutes. Liszt cut a Byronic swath through the women of 19th century Europe. All three of Wagner's children by Liszt's illegitimate daughter Cosima were conceived while she was still married to her first husband. Mussorgsky was a dipsomaniac and Tchaikovsky a homosexual. All these composers were able to transcend their personal difficulties to create great art; those searching for moral paradigms had better look elsewhere...