Books: Home Life at Valhalla

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; $24.95

It is 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. She saw it as a way of explaining to her children how a Godfearing woman like herself could have done such a thing. (Actually, an example was close at hand: Cosima was the illegitimate child of Franz Lizst and a married French countess.) But as years passed, the pages of Tagebuch became a record of her life with Wagner. When he died in 1883 she laid it aside for good, though she lived until 1930. Publication has been delayed by family squabbling and resultant legal complications.

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."

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. He cared about his three children, happily pitching in and cutting toenails.

He included her totally in his vast intellectual life, fully revealed for the first time. Together they read an astonishing variety of books. Shakespeare was a leitmotif of their days. One Christmastide they slogged through Tristram Shandy, finishing it with "aversion." Turgenev, Kleist, Aristophanes, Plutarch, Xenophon, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Moliere, Balzac, Cervantes: the list runs on like the Rhine.

He talked constantly about his work.