Cosima Wagner

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Cosima Wagner in London in 1877

Cosima Francesca Gaetana Wagner (born December 24, 1837 in Bellagio on Lake Como , Kingdom of Lombardy-Veneto , Habsburg Monarchy ; † April 1, 1930 in Bayreuth ; born Cosima de Flavigny ) was the daughter of the writer Countess Marie d'Agoult and the composer Franz Liszt , wife of the conductor Hans Freiherr von Bülow and later Richard Wagner's second wife . After his death in 1883, she directed the Bayreuth Festival until 1908 .

Life

Youth and marriage with Hans von Bülow

Cosima Wagner was born on December 24th, 1837, but traditionally celebrated her birthday on Christmas Day. Therefore, December 25th is often mistakenly given as the date of birth. As the illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt and Countess Marie d'Agoult (née de Flavigny), Cosima and her two siblings Blandine and Daniel were raised by their grandmother, Anna Liszt, and later in a Paris institute. It was not until 1844, after her father was legitimized, that Cosima had the name Liszt and no longer the maiden name of her mother. In 1853 she met his friend Richard Wagner while visiting her father in Paris . In 1855 Liszt brought his children to Weimar and a few months later handed them over to Baroness Franziska von Bülow in Berlin for further education. In addition to Marie von Buch , who later became a great supporter of Wagner, with whom she became close friends, she met the son of the house, Hans von Bülow , who was one of her father's most talented students, who had already made a name for himself as a conductor and pianist and was an ardent admirer of Wagner. Cosima was also musically gifted, also eloquent and wanted to be an artist. Her mother described her as follows:

“Cosima is a brilliant girl, very similar to her father. Your strong imagination will lead you off the beaten path; she has an inner demon to which she will resolutely sacrifice everything. In her there is both goodness and greatness. Often she lacks the right judgment, but that will develop, perhaps all too soon through the sad life experiences. "

On August 18, 1857, Cosima and Hans von Bülow married in the Hedwig Church in Berlin and, on their honeymoon, visited Richard Wagner in Zurich, who at that time was living in the garden house of the Villa Wesendonck . The two daughters Daniela and Blandine , named after the two siblings of Cosima Daniel and Blandine, came from the marriage with Bülow .

From the end of the 1850s, Cosima was almost lifelong friends with the actress Ellen Franz , who later became the Helene Freifrau von Heldburg and wife of Duke Georg II . At this time Ellen Franz was taking piano lessons from Hans von Bülow and the friendship between the two young women later influenced the Bayreuth Festival and the theater. As a result of the connection, Georg II hired Hans von Bülow as court conductor of the Meiningen court orchestra in 1880 , which, at the request of Richard Wagner, had formed the core of the festival orchestra for several years since the beginning of the Bayreuth Festival. From 1875 Cosima and Richard Wagner maintained artistic and friendly contact with the ducal couple in the form of mutual support for concerts and theater performances as well as personal visits.

Decision for Wagner

Their affection for Wagner, 24 years older (and 15 cm shorter), grew the more they saw each other. Together with her husband, who was now close friends with Wagner and who had created the piano reduction for Tristan , she visited the composer in Wiesbaden-Biebrich in the summer of 1862 , where he was working on the Mastersingers . In the summer of 1863, Cosima and Wagner confessed their mutual love on a carriage ride in Berlin (as in Wagner's autobiography Mein Leben ). In the summer of 1864 Cosima traveled with her daughters to Wagner's Pellet'sche Landhaus on Lake Starnberg , where Wagner had moved after he had found a patron in the young King Ludwig II . He supported Wagner financially and opened up an artistic perspective for him in Bavaria. In this situation Cosima chose Wagner and began her love affair with him.

Richard and Cosima Wagner (1872)

Cosima and Hans von Bülow (like Wagner) settled in Munich. Cosima became Wagner's “secretary” and also won King Ludwig's trust. She led a double life. Isolde , the first child of Cosima von Bülow and Richard Wagner, was born in Munich on April 10, 1865 . In 1867 she left Hans von Bülow to live with Richard Wagner, first in Haus Tribschen on Lake Lucerne , then in Bayreuth. Their second daughter Eva was born in Tribschen in February 1867 . In Tribschen she also got to know Friedrich Nietzsche . A divorce was only applied for after the birth of Richard Wagner's family owner Siegfried in June 1869. A good year later, on July 18, 1870, her marriage to Hans von Bülow was divorced.

On August 25, 1870, Cosima and Richard Wagner married in Lucerne . Born and raised Catholic, Cosima converted to Protestantism on October 31, 1872 after pastoral talks with Johann Christian Wilhelm Dittmar . In close collaboration with Wagner, she organized the first Bayreuth Festival (1876) and gave important impetus for Wagner's last work, Parsifal .

Widowhood - director of the Bayreuth Festival

When Richard Wagner died in 1883, his widow took over the management of the Bayreuth Festival at the suggestion of Hans von Wolhaben , which she held until 1906. Together with Adolf von Groß , who was in charge of the festival's finances, she succeeded in helping the Bayreuth Festival to gain international renown. In 1911 she was made an honorary citizen of the city of Bayreuth .

Cosima and Siegfried Wagner

Under her leadership, however, a freeze took place despite the artistically high-ranking singers. She saw herself as the “ Grail Keeper ” of an inheritance and tried to preserve Richard Wagner's works in exemplary performances. Any change was blocked by her, only the word and the supposed will of the master , her deceased husband, should be enforced with dogmatic severity. Critics of Richard Wagner's work were viewed by her as incompetent and inferior and were considered to be corrupted by the “Jewish artistic spirit”. All in all, she began to implement an anti-Jewish “ apartheid policy for the entire festival” in Bayreuth .

In 1908 she handed over the management of the festival to her son Siegfried, who kept it until his death in 1930. Cosima, however, remained the recognized head of the family and authoritative "mistress" of Villa Wahnfried . It was she who arranged for her son Siegfried to marry Winifred Williams in 1915 .

In 1913, her daughter Isolde was brought to trial because of financial claims because of Richard Wagner's paternity ( Beidler trial ). Against her better judgment, Cosima denied the paternity of Richard Wagner. The action was therefore dismissed.

Bust in the Bayreuth Festival Park

In 1917 she joined the German Fatherland Party . In her final years, Cosima was almost blind and partially paralyzed after a stroke and used a wheelchair. Despite her considerable restrictions, she signed the founding manifesto for the Kampfbund for German Culture on December 19, 1928 . After she died in Bayreuth at the age of 92, she was cremated in Coburg and buried next to her husband in the garden of Haus Wahnfried. Her urn is in the crypt next to Richard Wagner's sarcophagus.

effect

Anti-Semitism and the Bayreuth Circle

Cosima was an essential link between her husband Richard Wagner's anti-Semitism and the group around Houston Stewart Chamberlain and Adolf Hitler that emerged in the early 1920s around the Villa Wahnfried . The ardent Wagner admirer Chamberlain had already contacted Cosima Wagner in Bayreuth in 1888. After Chamberlain moved to Vienna in 1889, Cosima Wagner recommended him to read Arthur de Gobineau's racist essay on the inequality of human races (Essai sur l'inégalité des races humaines, 1853–1855). Cosima gave him an essential impetus for his main work The Foundations of the Nineteenth Century , which is pervaded by anti-Semitic statements and the idea of ​​having to protect German culture from Jewish influences and the consequences of “racial mixing”. The “degeneracy” of Vienna, which he believed he was seeing, made him all the more receptive to the political and religious “redemption” propagated by the Bayreuth circle around Cosima Wagner.

Cosima Wagner in 1905

Cosima's daughter Eva married Chamberlain in 1908. Cosima granted him, who at the beginning of the First World War was considered a renegade in his English homeland because of his pro-German attitude , a refuge. With his “scientific” anti-Semitism he saw himself as someone who further developed Wagner's positions. He saw the defeat of Germany in the World War and the Revolution as a work of Judaism and thus represented the same positions as Adolf Hitler. In 1923 Hitler came to Bayreuth for the first time as part of the German Day . He tried to use the reputation of the Wagners for his purposes and was promoted as a champion for the national cause by Chamberlain as well as by Winifred Wagner. Other National Socialists and anti-Semites such as Dietrich Eckart joined the group. After 1930, Hitler visited the Villa Wahnfried regularly and often stayed there. Winifred Wagner later stated that Hitler saw his real family in the Wagners.

Cosima Wagner's diaries

Cosima Wagner left extensive diaries that she kept from January 1, 1869 until Richard Wagner's death on February 13, 1883. In it she gives meticulous information about everyday life, family life with Richard Wagner as well as musical and literary preferences. Important for Wagner research are the “diary accompaniment” of the conception and composition of Wagner's last work Parsifal, as well as the diary explanations on the development of the festival. The diaries allegedly came into the possession of Wagner's daughter Eva Chamberlain as a gift in 1911 and after her death remained under lock and key at the Bayerische Staatsbank in Munich until 1972 due to a will. It wasn't until 1975 that they were released to the public after years of litigation. They were completely transferred and published by Martin Gregor-Dellin in 1976.

Honors

See also

literature

swell

  • Martin Gregor-Dellin, Dietrich Mack (eds.), Cosima Wagner: The diaries. 2 volumes. Piper, Munich 1976–1978, ISBN 3-492-02199-9 .
  • Dietrich Mack (Ed.): Cosima Wagner. The Second Life: Letters and Notes 1883–1930. Piper, Munich 1980, ISBN 3-492-02472-6 .
  • Dieter Steil: "... our art is a religion ..." The correspondence between Cosima Wagner and Hermann Levi. (= Collection of musicological treatises 101), Baden-Baden: Koerner 2018, ISBN 978-3-87320-601-4 [1]

Secondary literature

  • Franz W. Beidler:
    • Cosima Wagner-Liszt - the path to the Wagner myth: selected writings by Wagner's first grandson and his unpublished correspondence with Thomas Mann . Pendragon, Bielefeld 1997, ISBN 3-923306-86-5 .
    • Cosima Wagner: a portrait. Richard Wagner's first grandson: Selected writings and correspondence with Thomas Mann . Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2011, ISBN 978-3-8260-4440-3 .
  • Françoise Giroud: Cosima Wagner. dtv, Munich 1998, ISBN 3-423-24133-0 .
  • Maren Goltz, Hertha Müller: »Queen and Dove«. The letters from Cosima Wagner to Ellen Franz / Helene von Heldburg. Allitera Verlag , Munich 2014, ISBN 978-3-86906-507-6 .
  • Oliver Hilmes : Mistress of the Hill. Siedler, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-88680-836-6 .
  • Oliver Hilmes: Cosima's children. Siedler, Munich 2009, ISBN 978-3-88680-899-1 .
  • Michael Karbaum (ed.): Studies on the history of the Bayreuth Festival (1876–1976). Bosse, Regensburg 1976, ISBN 3-7649-2060-2 .
  • George R. Marek: Cosima Wagner. 3. Edition. Hestia, Bayreuth 1983, ISBN 3-7770-0234-8 .
  • Richard Du Moulin-Eckart : Cosima Wagner. A portrait of her 80th birthday , Bayreuth: Gießel 1918.

Web links

Commons : Cosima Wagner  - album with pictures, videos and audio files

Individual evidence

  1. ^ Ernst Burger: Franz Liszt: a life chronicle in pictures and documents In: Google Books
  2. ^ Helge Dvorak: Biographical Lexicon of the German Burschenschaft. Volume I: Politicians, Part 1: A – E. Heidelberg 1996, p. 209.
  3. ↑ Bernd Mayer : Bayreuth as it was. Flash lights from the city's history 1850–1950 . 2nd Edition. Gondrom, Bayreuth 1981, p. 41 .
  4. ↑ Hannes Heer : How can you tell the story of the Holocaust and the war of extermination? About memory politics in a memory-resistant society. In: Hannes Obermair , Sabrina Michielli (ed.): Cultures of remembrance of the 20th century in comparison - Culture della memoria del Novecento al confronto. (= Booklets on the history of Bolzano / Quaderni di storia cittadina 7). Bozen, City of Bozen 2014, ISBN 978-88-907060-9-7 , pp. 115–153, here p. 140.
  5. ^ Ernst Klee : The culture lexicon for the Third Reich. Who was what before and after 1945. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 2007, ISBN 978-3-10-039326-5 , p. 636.
  6. ↑ Bernd Mayer: Where every tenth person owned a chair . In: Heimatkurier des Nordbayerischen Kuriers , 3/2004, p. 15.
  7. ↑ Oliver Hilmes: Mistress of the Hill. Siedler, Munich 2007, ISBN 978-3-88680-836-6 .
  8. ↑ Cosima Wagner. In: FemBio.
  9. ↑ Rosa and Volker carbon home: Bayreuth from AZ. Lexicon of Bayreuth street names . Rabenstein, Bayreuth 2009, ISBN 978-3-928683-44-9 , pp. 35 .
  10. ↑ Cosimaplatz. In: Street name lexicon of the Luisenstädtischer Bildungsverein (near  Kaupert ) on Cosimaplatz. In: cosimaplatz.net. Retrieved September 15, 2009.
  11. ↑ Raiding in numbers. In: Raiding.at. Retrieved September 15, 2009.
personal data
SURNAME Wagner, Cosima
ALTERNATIVE NAMES de Flavigny, Cosima; Liszt, Cosima; von Bülow, Cosima
BRIEF DESCRIPTION German composer's wife, festival director, diary writer
DATE OF BIRTH December 25, 1837
PLACE OF BIRTH Bellagio , Kingdom of Lombardy-Veneto, Habsburg Monarchy
DATE OF DEATH April 1, 1930
Place of death Bayreuth , Bavaria, Germany