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Updated: May 18, 2025
What Cosima was to Wagner is best told in Liszt's words, written to a friend after a visit to Bayreuth, in 1872, when his favorite child had been married to Wagner two years.
Here he finished the Ring and planned Bayreuth. Another thing which contributed to his unpopularity was his relations with his own and another man's wife. Hans von Bülow, his pupil, had married Liszt's daughter Cosima: that lady became infatuated with Wagner, and Wagner with her, and they virtually eloped together.
Hans von Bülow was sent for as one of the conductors; young Hans Richter lived in Munich and later became one of the most distinguished conductors of Wagner's music. The Bülows arrived in Munich in the early autumn, and almost at once began the attraction of Mme. Cosima von Bülow and Wagner.
The sum of two hundred and seventy marks realised by this was brought to me at the Hotel Brandenburg, where I was dining with the Bulows, and was an addition to my reserves that furnished us with many a jest. As Bulow had to complete the preparations for his concert, I drove out alone with Cosima on the promenade, as before, in a fine carriage. This time all our jocularity died away into silence.
Nordica decided to add "Sieglinde" to her repertoire, but with no special purpose of singing it at Bayreuth, she arranged with Frau Cosima to go over the rôle with her, and in order to do so made a trip to Switzerland, where the former was staying. So far as adding to her reputation was concerned, there was not the slightest reason for Mme. Nordica to do this.
When calamity followed calamity, to her all the trouble seemed due to Richard's pig-headedness; and she would at once have grown cheerful and good-natured had he burned his finished and unfinished scores and written "something popular." She was, I say, impossible. Cosima, for her part, found Bülow impossible. A splendid character in many ways, he was as wayward and quarrelsome a man as has lived.
That this arbitrary strangling of the Christ in him never altogether ended, is proved by the words of those tragic messages he sent to Cosima Wagner from "the aristocratic city of Turin" when his tormented brain broke like a taut bow-string. Those messages resembled arrows of fire, shot into space; and on one was written the words "The Crucified" and on the other the word "Dionysus."
The two men with whom Cosima has thus stood in such intimate relation are exceptional even among great musicians. Composers are usually strongly emotional, inspired in all that pertains to their art, but with a specialist's lack of interest in everything else.
They remained together six years, Cosima, born in 1837, being one of the three children resulting from the union. In the Countess's relations with Liszt there appears to have been a curious mingling of la grande passion and hauteur.
Together, after Daniel's death, they knelt beside his bed "praying to God that His will be done and that He reconcile us to that Divine will, in according us the grace on our part to accept it without a murmur." Such a scene was a memory for a lifetime. Cosima herself, in one of her letters, gives a beautiful description of her brother's passage from life.
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