Hans von Bülow spent the rest of his life pretending that the child was his, but he knew that the child was Wagner’s. On April 12, 1865, Cosima gave birth to a third daughter, who was named Isolde. Wagner and Cosima – both illegitimate children themselves – wasted little in conceiving their own. But there is also no doubt that Richard Wagner and Cosima Liszt von Bülow did indeed fall in love with each other in November of 1863. With tears and sobs we sealed our confession to belong to each other alone.”Ī typical Wagnerian “dramatization”? No doubt. We gazed speechless into each other’s eyes an intense longing to speak the truth overpowered us and led to a confession, of the boundless unhappiness that weighed upon us. Years later, in his autobiography, Wagner described the moment that changed their lives: While Hans was at work one day, Wagner and Cosima went out for a drive. In late November of 1863, Wagner decided to visit the von Bülows, who were at the time living in Berlin. In the very first year of my marriage I was in such despair that I wanted to die.”īy the time Cosima wrote this – in 1869 – she’d been sleeping with Wagner for six years (since 1863), and openly living with him for three years (since 1866). I still feel the same for him as I did twelve years ago: great sympathy for his destiny, delight in his gifts both of mind and heart, a real esteem for his character, together with complete incompatibility of disposition. “It was a great misunderstanding that united us in matrimony. On January 8, 1869, after nearly 12 years of marriage, Cosima confessed to her diary: Though he was an outstanding pianist and conductor, von Bülow was no Richard Wagner or Franz Liszt, and Cosima desperately needed to play the role of an indispensible muse to a great man. Of course, this was before Cosima had become disenchanted with her marriage to Hans. Wagner was 24 years Cosima’s senior, and at the time of the visit she thought him to be self-centered and vulgar. On August 18, 1857, the nineteen year-old Cosima Liszt left her miserable adolescence behind and began her miserable young adulthood by marrying the now 27 year-old Hans von Bülow. But it was there that she met her governess’ son, a 25 year-old pianist and conductor named Hans Guido von Bülow. (Nice!) After living in Paris for most of her life, Cosima was truly miserable: she hated Berlin. Madame von Bülow was an old friend of Liszt’s, and it’s generally believed that the move was engineered – again! – by Liszt’s mistress Princess Carolyne Wittgenstein, this time to deny them contact with their mother, Marie D’Agoult. “I can still see Cosima’s rapturous expression with tears running down her sharp nose.”Īt the age of seventeen, Cosima – together with her brother and sister – was unceremoniously shipped off from Paris to Berlin, where they were placed in the care of Franziska Elisabeth von Bülow. Princess Carolyne’s daughter Maria recalled: He read from his recently completed poem, The Ring of the Nibelungen. Wagner took no notice of Cosima, although Cosima noticed him. (Her siblings called her the “stork” and “the ugly duckling”. Cosima, not quite 16 years old at the time, was as awkward as they come: tall, gangly, gawky, razor thin, with a huge beaked nose. In October of 1853, Liszt and his “entourage” (including Princess Carolyne, Carolyne’s daughter Maria, and Richard Wagner) swept into Paris to finally visit the children. In particular she hated Jews, despite the fact that one of her great-grandfathers had been Jewish. She survived by creating a mask of icy respectability and by nurturing hatreds so vehement that she would, in time, make Wagner look Mr. Cosima, not quite thirteen when Madame Patersi came into her life, spent the remainder of her adolescence in what has been described as “a living hell”: a loveless, joyless, often sadistic atmosphere. In 1850 Liszt’s next lady friend – the Princess Carolyne Wittgenstein – convinced him to turn the children over to her own governess: a tyrannical septuagenarian named Madame Patersi de Fossombroni whose “teaching regimen” has been likened to that used for breaking in horses. Princess Carolyne Wittgenstein (1819-1887) in 1828
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