Cosima Wagner

See also: Wagner

Cosima Wagner , born Cosima Liszt with Bellagio (Italy) the December 25th 1837 and died with Bayreuth on April 1st 1930, was a German personality , girl of Franz Liszt and second woman of the type-setter Richard Wagner, of which it maintained the worship for one half-century with the Festival of Bayreuth.

It is the fruit of the connection extraconjugale of the Pianiste and Compositeur Franz Liszt and of the countess Marie d' Agoult, which wrote under the pen name “Daniel Stern”.

In 1857, it marries one of the pupils most endowed with his father, the pianist and large Leader Hans von Bülow, but their marriage will not be happy. They have two girls, Daniela and Blandine.

It is von Bülow which presents it to Richard Wagner, twenty-four years older than it and itself already married. A connection begins in 1862, and in 1866, it settle at the edge of the Lac of the Four Cantons to Tribschen, in a villa placed at their disposal by the king Louis II of Bavaria, friend and guard of Wagner. Cosima, which separates from von Bülow in 1867, gave to Richard three children before they can marry the July 25th 1871:

Isolde von Bülow, born in 1865;
Eva von Bülow, born in 1867;
Siegfried Wagner, born in 1869.

Their first names are drawn from operas of Wagner, respectively Tristan and Isolde , the Masters Singers of Nuremberg and the Ring of Nibelung .

The morning of Sunday December 25th 1870, at the time of its birthday, Richard offers a Tribschener Idyll to him put Fidi-Vogelgesang und Orange-Sonnenaufgang ( Idylle de Tribschen with song of bird of Fidi and orange sunrise ), carried out by thirteen instrumentalists of the Orchestra of Zürcher Tonhalle on the large staircase of the villa. The work, published later under the name of Siegfried-Idyll , is an anthem with the marital happiness which celebrates the rest finally found by the couple. The Wagner children will call it more prosaically music of the staircase ().

Of 1869 with 1883, it held a newspaper of their common life.

Richard dies the February 13rd 1883. He returns in Cosima to have maintained the existence of the Festival of Bayreuth, whose only two exceptional sessions had taken place in 1876 and 1882. Helped by her Siegfried son and for the financial aspects by Adolf von Groß, it directs it until in 1911 and makes of it the place of the celebration of the worship of his/her late husband, in a resolutely preserving orientation, refusing for example until its death any change in the setting in scene, the decorations and the costumes of the creation of Parsifal .

She dies on April 1st 1930 at the age of quatre-vingt-douze years, forty seven years after Richard and the same year as Siegfried. She is buried at the sides of Richard in the garden of the Villa Wahnfried.

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