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Updated: June 18, 2025
One evening the composer outlined to his friends his plans for "Parsifal," adding that it probably would be his last work. The little circle was deeply affected, and Cosima wept. Strange prescience! "Parsifal" was not produced until twenty years later, yet it proved to be the finale of Wagner's life's labors. The incident has interest from another point of view.
Nordica was preparing to sing "Elsa" at Bayreuth, it was Frau Cosima who went over the rôle with her, sometimes repeating a single phrase a hundred times in order to assure the correct pronunciation of one word. It taxed the singer to the utmost; but she found Wagner's widow willing to work as long and as hard as she herself would. The performance established Mme. Nordica as a Wagner singer.
His music has made steady progress through the efforts of such advocates as Liszt, Von Bülow, and Richter in Germany, Pasdeloup in France, Hueffer in England, and Theodore Thomas in the United States. In 1870 he married Frau Cosima von Bülow, the daughter of Liszt, an event which provoked almost as much comment in social circles as his operas have in musical.
Cosima flew to his aid, but could not hold back the inevitable. When the doctor came and told her that Wagner had finished his struggle with the arch-critic, Death, she screamed and fainted. For twenty-six hours she refused to leave his body or to take any food, and could be dragged away only when she had fainted from exhaustion.
For there he had been able to work in perfect seclusion, under the protection and forethought of the devoted Cosima.
Moreover, the quick, responsive lighting up of the features, her graceful bearing, her tact that these were inherited from him a brief surveillance of the two sufficed to disclose. Combined with these fascinating, but after all more or less superficial characteristics was the stamp of a rare intellectual force on both faces. No one seeing them together needed to be told that Cosima was a Liszt.
Immense crowds, flags, waving banners, uniforms, flashing swords, snorting chargers and so on set Wagner to work on the first as surely as the picture of the Hall of Song suggested the march in Tannhäuser; the same is the case with the second; the Siegfried Idyll, of course, was written for performance at the bedroom door or window of Madame Cosima on that lady's birthday.
Petersburg suggesting that she should meet me at the Bulows' in Berlin. I had taken into mature consideration the kindly interest which Cosima had conceived for her, with a view to discussing what steps we could take to bring order into our friend's flagrantly disorganised circumstances.
It put us into a good-humour to be able to set his mind at rest in this case, for nothing could possibly put me out of sympathy with Cosima. So, sharing my hopes and heartily rejoicing in the turn of my fortune, these two friends accompanied me to the Konigsburg railway station and saw me off on my long night journey. In Konigsburg I had to wait half a day and a night.
Cosima, as I was now informed, had passed me by in haste on her way to Paris to offer her support for a short time to her grandmother, who was suffering from a tedious illness, and had now received a most painful blow by the news of the death of Blandine after her confinement, which had taken place at St. Tropez.
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