Word: wagnerities
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...COSIMA WAGNER'S DIARIES, VOL. I, 1869-1877 Edited by Martin Gregor-Dellin and Dietrich Mack Translated by Geoffrey Skelton; Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; 1199 pages...
Residual gallantries survive all over the society, but it takes something of an individualist to practice them. Mrs. Robert Wagner, wife of the former mayor of New York, laments that the thank-you note after a party is becoming rarer and rarer. "In the olden days," she says, "you wrote automatically. The notes were done by rote and said nothing. Now they may be fewer, but they mean more." Dr. Alfred Messer of Atlanta cheerfully tells a story of going to eat lunch at his hospital's dining room some months ago. "I instinctively stood up to hold the chair...
...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...
Some of the entries are predictable and disagreeable. Both Wagners were virulent anti-Semites, occasionally to the point of black comedy. Lamenting, as he often did, the decline of morality and religion, Wagner concluded, "The old Jewish God always ruins the whole thing." Roman Catholics stood little higher in their estimation and they loathed the French too. During the Franco-Prussian War, they summed things up by saying that France "has been undermined by the spirit of the Jesuits...