Cosima Wagner's Diaries. Volume I. 1869-1877

London England: Collins. Very Good/Very Good. 1978. First Edition. Cloth. 8vo - over 7¾" - 9¾" tall 0002161303 Hardback Hardback. First Edition. Heavy book. Overseas orders will have to pay extra postage. Very slight shelf wear to top edge of D/J. Slightly sunned spine to D/J. Price clipped to D/J. Cosima Wagner was a remarkable woman. Daughter of franz Liszt, wife of the conductor Hans von Bulow, at the age of thrity-one she abandoned her husband and two daughters of her marriage to join her life with that of the man whose genius she revered. She had already borne Wagner two daughters, and was soon to give him a son. This first volume covers some of the crucial years of his life. Under Cosima's influence, he resumed work on The Ring of the Nibelungs - a task which had earlied daunted him by its magnitude. At the same time another gigantic enterprise was conceived and realized: the financing and building of a festival theatre in Bayreuth, and the first performances of the Bayreuth Festspiele. In her understanding of Wagner's literary and musical work Cosima was, as Wagner himself recognized, an equal partner. She also participated actively in the creation of the Bayreuth festivals, and, less happily, espused the composer's many prejudices. But the special attraction of the diaries lies in their private revelations: the minutiae of child-rearing and housekeeping; the quarrels and tensions brought about by Wagner's moodiness and constant money problems; Cosima's own tendency to depression, her torment when separated from her two elder daughters, and her struggle to obtain the divorce which would regularize her position and remove the stigma on her children. Every page of her single-minded chronicle of devotion throws new light on Wagner, whose comments on mucis, literature, people, events, even his dreams, she set down for her children and for posterity. Illustrated. 1199 pp. (We carry a wide selection of titles in The Arts, Theology, History, Politics, Social and Physical Sciences. academic and scholarly books and Modern First Editions ,and all types of Academic Literature.) .