Oliver Hilmes: "Cosima Wagner: The Lady of Bayreuth"
Bayreuth’s Daunting Dowager
Cosima Wagner: The Lady of Bayreuth
By Oliver Hilmes, Stewart Spencer translator
360 pages, 30 b/w illustrations
Yale University Press ISBN: 9780300170900
Cosima Wagner’s life was a maelstrom of Illegitimacy, cuckoldry, mendacity, vindictiveness, anti-semitism, jingoism, and risky gay affairs by her son Siegfried.
All this and more is detailed in Oliver Hilmes’ biography, Cosima Wagner: The Lady of Bayreuth. Originally published in Germany in 2007 as Herrin des Hügels: Das Leben der Cosima, the book was translated into English by noted Wagnerian Stewart Spencer. The English-language version was recently released as a paperback by Yale University Press.
In his Prologue Hilmes notes that he is the first Cosima biographer to have full access to the National Archives of the Richard Wagner Foundation. Much of this collection is still un-catalogued.
Yet for all of the reference material available, including Cosima’s two-volume diary, at times in Hilmes’ book Cosima seems more like a passive participant than a central figure in the various dramas swirling around her.
As Hilmes writes, “it is difficult for even most hardened Wagnerians to form a clear picture of Cosima’s personality… the outlines of [Cosima’s] physiognomy remain strangely blurred, and for the most part her personality disappears behind her self-appointed mission in life.”
Missing Father?
The illegitimate daughter of composer and pianist Franz Liszt and Marie d’Agoult, Cosima and her two siblings were placed under the care of a strict, rigidly conservative governess. At one point Liszt was absent for 12 years and as she grew up Cosima developed a perverse sense of humility, self sacrifice and denial of personal needs, reinforced by her reading influenced by Thomas à Kempris’ “De Imitatione Christi”.
These traits defined her submissive relationship with the egotistical Wagner. Cosima grew up without her absent father and her first husband, Hans von Bülow, was a weak-willed spouse. Since Wagner was 24 years old than Cosima, one wonders if there was a filial undercurrent in the Wagner’s relationship.
Institutionalizing a Legacy
Following Wagner’s death in 1883, Cosima lived for another 47 years, managing the festival and directing productions there until 1906, when frail health finally forced her to retire. (Wagneropera.net’s Cosima Wagner page lists the productions Cosima directed. Her productions of the four Ring operas continued to be staged in Bayreuth for two seasons after she died in 1930.)
Cosima’s unwavering mission was to perpetuate her composer-husband’s legacy and to ensure that the Richard Wagner Festival continued under the Wagner family’s stewardship. The festival was an experiment during Wagner’s lifetime but under Cosima it became “a flourishing family concern and a social institution.”
Cosima maintained a behind-the-scenes presence for at least 18 more years after she retired, attending rehearsals and sending notes to artists as late as 1924.
During her final years Cosima was an invalid, until she died at the age of 92 (she was born on Christmas Eve, 1837). Siegfried, the Wagners’ only son, died a few months afterward.
Haunted House
In 1923, Cosima and son-in-law Houston Stewart Chamberlain, Bayreuth’s most virulent anti-semite, watched from a first-floor window at Haus Wanfried as 6,000 SA troops paraded through the streets of Bayreuth. Chamberlain’s dairy does not mention whether Hitler was introduced to Bayreuth’s elderly doyenne when he visited the Wagner family the following day.
“It was Cosima’s charisma as the legitimate ‘guardian of the grail’, her organizational skill and her ideological obstinacy that enabled Bayreuth to prove so disastrously effective as a political force in Germany,” Hilmes writes.
There’s no question that Cosima’s prejudices made it easier for Chamberlain and her daughter-in-law Winifred to embrace Nazi ideology. But it seems unfair for Hilmes to assign so much blame to Cosima for the Wagner family’s anti-semitism, especially given Wagner’s repugnant views before he and Cosima married.
Other Sources
Hilmes supplemented Cosima’s voluminous (and at times unreliable) diaries and the massive amount of correspondence and other material in the Wagner Archives with records from other sources, including undiscovered material from the attorney for one of Cosima’s and Richard’s illegitimate offspring, Isolde Beidler (née Isolde von Bülow)
These records are partly the basis for one of the book’s most engrossing accounts, the conflict between the Wagner family and Isolde and her husband, conductor Franz Beidler. This increasingly acrimonious relationship ended in Isolde’s being disinherited in 1914 after she filed an unsuccessful paternity suit.
The lawsuit’s outcome also ensured that Siegfried, wife Winifred and their descendents retained control over the Wagner Festival.
Franz Wilhelm Beidler’s Cosima Biography
Hilmes characterizes most previous Cosima biographies as bombastic, propagandistic or incomplete. He is especially dismissive of Richard Du Moulin-Eckart’s two-volume study published in 1929, shortly before Cosima’s death, and biographies written by Ilse Lotz and Max Millenkovich-Morold in the 1930s when the National Socialists were ascendant in Germany.
However Hilmes does praise “Franz Wilhelm [Beidler]’s writings on his grandmother, for even though he was denied access to the Bayreuth archives, [Beidler] was able to relate the many published sources and in that way produce a convincing picture of Cosima’s character and the age in which she lived.”
Beilder was the son of Franz and Isolde Beidler and the cover of his recently reissued biography, Cosima Wagner: Ein Portrait, includes a photo of the infant Franz Wilhelm next to his grandmother, Cosima. (The photo was taken before Cosima and the Beidlers were permanently estranged and even in this photo Cosima appears to be detached and severe.) Beidler’s book was first published in 1997 and re-issued this year. For now, it is only available in German.
Hilmes’ rather opaque prose lacks the vibrancy found in similar studies such as Brigitte Hamann’s Winifred Wagner biography, Jonathan Carr’s The Wagner Clan and especially Alan Walker’s Hans von Bülow: A Life and Times. Nonetheless, Cosima: The Lady of Bayreuth is a book many Wagnerians and others interested in nineteenth- and early-twentieth century German history will want to read.
Other Reviews and Links
- Paul Levy (The Guardian)
- Phillip Hensher (The Telegraph)
- Colin Baskerville (Wagner Society of NSW Inc)
- Yale University Press/Cosima Wagner: The Lady of Bayreuth