Cosima Wagner

Francesca Gaetana Cosima Wagner (; 24 December 1837 – 1April 1930) was a German businesswoman who was the daughter of the Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt and Franco-German romantic author Marie d'Agoult. She became the second wife of the German composer Richard Wagner, and with him founded the Bayreuth Festival as a showcase for his stage works. After his death she devoted the rest of her life to the promotion of the festival and his music and philosophy. Commentators have recognised Cosima as the principal inspiration for Wagner's later works, particularly Parsifal.

In 1857, after a childhood largely spent under the care of her grandmother and with governesses, Cosima married the conductor Hans von Bülow. Although the marriage produced two children, it was largely a loveless union, and in 1863 Cosima began a relationship with Wagner, who was 24 years her senior. They married in 1870; after Wagner's death in 1883 she directed the Bayreuth Festival for more than 20 years, increasing its repertoire to form the Bayreuth canon of ten operas and establishing the festival as a major event in the world of musical theatre.

During her directorship, Cosima opposed theatrical innovations and adhered closely to Wagner's original productions of his works, an approach continued by her successors long after her retirement in 1907. Under her influence, Bayreuth became increasingly identified with antisemitism. This was a defining aspect of Bayreuth for decades, into the Nazi era which closely followed her death there in 1930. Thus, although she is widely perceived as the saviour of the festival, her legacy remains controversial.

Family background and early childhood

In January 1833 the 21-year-old Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt met Marie d'Agoult, a Parisian socialite six years his senior. Marie had been married since 1827 to Charles, Comte d'Agoult, and had borne him two daughters, but the union had become sterile. Drawn together by their mutual intellectual interests, Marie and Liszt embarked on a passionate relationship. In March 1835 the couple fled Paris for Switzerland; ignoring the scandal they left in their wake, they settled in Geneva where, on 18 December, Marie gave birth to a daughter, Blandine-Rachel. At the end, critical reactions ranged between that of the Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg, who thought the entire work "divinely composed", and that of the French newspaper Le Figaro who called the music "the dream of a lunatic". Wagner himself was far from satisfied; in a letter to Ludwig he denounced the singers Albert Niemann and Franz Betz as "theatrical parasites" and complained that Richter had not got a single tempo correct. Months later, Cosima records, his attitude towards the productions was "Never again, never again!".

Parsifal

After the conclusion of the festival and the departure of the guests, Wagner and Cosima left with the children for Venice, where they remained until December. The festival had accumulated a large financial deficit; this, and Wagner's deep artistic dissatisfaction, precluded the possibility of any repeat in the near future. Wagner's mood was such that he seriously contemplated giving up the entire Bayreuth project; he was distracted from such thoughts by an invitation to conduct a series of concerts in London. Leaving the children behind, he and Cosima enjoyed a two-month break in England where, among others, Cosima met the novelist George Eliot, the poet Robert Browning, and the painter Edward Burne-Jones (who made a number of sketches of Cosima from which no finished painting emerged). On 17 May both Wagners were received by Queen Victoria at Windsor Castle. (The queen described Wagner in her journal as "grown old and stout, [with] a clever, but not pleasing countenance".) Cosima's had no such basis, and whereas Wagner retained an ability to revise his views on the basis of his experiences, Cosima's anti-Semitism was visceral and remained unchanged. Cosima records Levi's astonishment on being informed of his appointment. Ludwig was insistent that, despite Wagner's objections, the appointment would stand. Levi would subsequently establish himself as the supreme conductor of the work, held by critical opinion to be "beyond praise".

At the second Bayreuth Festival Parsifal was performed 16 times; at the last performance on 29 August, Wagner himself conducted the final scene. Cosima wrote afterwards of how different the orchestra and singers sounded under Wagner. Overall, she and Wagner were entirely satisfied with the outcome of the festival which, unlike its predecessor, had made a handsome profit: "ot once did the spirit of toil and dedication on the part of the artists abate ... I believe one may be satisfied". One dissident voice was that of Friedrich Nietzsche, once a devoted friend of Wagner's but latterly a harsh critic. Nietzsche considered Parsifal an abomination for which Cosima was responsible; she had corrupted Wagner. The principal concern during the autumn and winter months was Wagner's declining health; his heart spasms had become so frequent that on 16 November 1882 Cosima recorded: "Today he did have a spasm!". Cosima's journal entry for 12 February 1883—the last she was to make—records Wagner reading Fouqué's novel Undine, and playing the Rhinemaidens' lament from Das Rheingold on the piano. At around noon on that day, Wagner suffered a fatal heart attack, and he died in the middle of the afternoon.

Cosima sat with Wagner's body for more than 24 hours, refusing all refreshment or respite. Afterwards she went into seclusion for many months, barely even seeing her children, with whom she communicated mainly through written notes. Among many messages, she received a telegram from Bülow: "Soeur il faut vivre" ("Sister, it is necessary to live").

Mistress of Bayreuth

Interregnum

Wagner had left neither a will, nor instruction on the management of the Bayreuth Festival after his death. He had written of the future: "I ... cannot think of a single person who could say what I believe needs to be said ... there is practically no one on whose judgement I could rely". The festival's uncertain outlook was aggravated by Cosima's total withdrawal from all contact except that of her daughters and her friend and adviser Adolf von Groß. Without Cosima's participation the 1883 festival, as planned by Wagner—12 performances of Parsifal—went ahead, with Emil Scaria (who sang the role of Gurnemanz in the opera) doubling as artistic director. The cast was largely that of 1882, and Levi remained as conductor.

At the conclusion of the festival Cosima received a long, critical memorandum from an unknown observer, which highlighted numerous divergences from Wagner's directions. This, says Marek, proved to be a critical factor in determining her future life's mission: the maintenance of Wagner's heritage creations through the preservation of his interpretations. In her seclusion, Cosima learned of an abortive plan masterminded by Julius Kniese, the festival's chorus-master, by which Liszt was to assume the role of music director and Bülow would be chief conductor. Neither Liszt nor Bülow was interested in this arrangement, and the plan died. With Groß's assistance, Cosima pre-empted any further attempts by outsiders to assume control of the Wagner legacy, by obtaining legal recognition of herself and Siegfried as sole heirs to all Wagner's property, physical and intellectual. By this means she secured an unassailable advantage over any other claim on direction of the festival's future. although Bülow resisted all offers to participate. In the course of her long stewardship Cosima overcame the misgivings of the hardline Wagnerites patrons who believed that Wagner's works should not be entrusted to a non-German. Under her watch the festival moved from an uncertain financial basis into a prosperous business undertaking that brought great riches to the Wagner family.

Although the festival's historian, Frederic Spotts, suggests that Cosima was more creative than she affected to be, the primary purpose of all her productions was to follow the instructions and reflect the wishes of the Master: "There is nothing left for us here to create, but only to perfect in detail". This policy incurred criticism, among others from Bernard Shaw, who in 1889 mocked Cosima as the "chief remembrancer". Shaw scorned the idea that Wagner's wishes were best represented by the slavish copying in perpetuity of the performances he had witnessed. Ten years later Shaw highlighted as a feature of the "Bayreuth style" the "intolerably old-fashioned tradition of half rhetorical, half historical-pictorial attitudes and gestures", and the characteristic singing, "sometime tolerable, sometimes abominable". The subordination of the music to text, diction and character portrayal was a specific feature of the Bayreuth style; Cosima, according to Spotts, turned the principle of clear enunciation into "a fetish ... The resulting harsh declamatory style came to be derided as ... the infamous Bayreuth bark".

Parsifal was shown alongside other works at each of Cosima's festivals except for 1896, which was devoted to a revival of the Ring cycle. In 1886, her first year in charge, she added Tristan und Isolde to the canon. Siegfried made few changes to the production traditions set by Wagner and Cosima; Spotts records that "whatever had been laid down by his parents was preserved unchanged out of a sense of strict filial duty". Only in matters on which they had not spoken was he prepared to exercise his own judgement. As a result, the original Parsifal sets remained in use even when they were visibly crumbling; the view of Cosima and her daughters was that no changes should ever be made to stage sets "on which the eye of the Master had rested".

In December 1908 Eva, then 41, married Houston Stewart Chamberlain, a British-born historian who had adopted as his personal creed a fanatical form of German nationalism based on principles of extreme racial and cultural purity.

By 1927, the year of her 90th birthday, Cosima's health was failing. The birthday was marked in Bayreuth by the naming of a street in her honour, although she was unaware; the family thought that knowledge of the celebrations would overexcite her. In her last years she was virtually bedridden, became blind, and was lucid only at intervals. She died, aged 92, on 1 April 1930; after a funeral service at Wahnfried her body was taken to Coburg and cremated. In 1977, 47 years after her death, Cosima's urn was recovered from Coburg and buried alongside Wagner in the Wahnfried garden. Guided by Groß, but also using her own acumen—Werner calls her a "superb business woman"—she succeeded in making the festival first solvent, then profitable. The close association of the festival with Hitler and the Nazis during the 1930s was much more the work of Winifred—an overt Hitler supporter—than of Cosima, though Hensher asserts that "Cosima was as much to blame as anyone". , Cosima's first biographer, introduced her as "the greatest woman of the century". In time judgements became more measured, and divided. Marek closes his account by emphasising her role not only as Wagner's protector but as his muse: "Without her there would have been no Siegfried Idyll, no Bayreuth, and no Parsifal". In Hensher's judgement, "Wagner was a genius, but also a fairly appalling human being. Cosima was just an appalling human being." which is in Neuenstein Castle in the town of Neuenstein, Baden-Württemberg, Germany.

Cosima Wagner's diaries were published in Germany in 1976 and translated into English in 1978. They run to more than 4,000 pages. In his comment to the publisher appearing on the second volume's dust-jacket, the scholar George Steiner remarked that mining these texts for important detail contextualizing various significant historical events and phenomena was likely "to be a task that occupies generations of scholars."

Bayreuth Festival performances under her The symbol indicates a work's Bayreuth premiere. Under Cosima Wagner Parsifal was performed 97 times, Tristan und Isolde 24, Die Meistersinger 22, Tannhäuser 21, Lohengrin 6, the Ring cycle 18 and Der fliegende Holländer 10. Year Works performed No. of performances Conductor 1886 1888 1889 1891 1892 1894 1896 Der Ring des Nibelungen (Ring cycle) 5 1897 1899 1901 1902 1904 1906

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