Word: lovelies
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...hard to imagine the domestic side of Richard Wagner. Composing, conducting, fleeing creditors, courting kings, falling in love, venting his deep biases, building a theater and peopling an entire mythical world, all these things, yes. Life's dailiness seems somehow inappropriate to such a man as it is to most legendary artists. But his last 14 years are about to receive intense scrutiny by scholars, Wagner lovers and Wagner loathers-who seem to exist in equal numbers -for they were recorded in torrential detail by his second wife Cosima in her diary...
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...
They were neither an admirable nor likable pair, but the diary is far from an odious document. If it does not redeem them, it does manage to enhance them, principally because of their love for each other. In his chronic deep depressions Wagner felt that only Cosima's existence kept him from suicide. On their son's first birthday she writes, "At 4:30 I am awakened by sweet sounds, R. at the piano proclaiming to me the hour of birth." He would sing to her as she worked, a cantilena from / Puritani, a melody of Beethoven...
...Britain's National Theater, Harold Pinter is throwing the eternal triangle into reverse. In the first of nine scenes he stirs the ashes of an adulterous love affair in 1977, and in the last reveals its flash-fire inception...
...married to Emma (Penelope Wilton). In the drunken pass that ignites the affair in Scene 9, Jerry says to Emma, "I should have had you, in your white, before the wedding." Lust will find a way. Jerry rents a place in the country, and the pair make love in the afternoons. But joy is applied like a cosmetic, and pain is masked in a clipped orgy of understatement...