Daughter of composer Franz Liszt, Cosima married Richard Wagner in 1869 and after his death assumed the directorship of the Bayreuth Festival dedicated to the performance of Wagner’s works, which she held until 1906. Cosima’s attitudes toward Jews were as elusive and contradictory as those of her husband, but her diaries and letters are a valuable source for determining not only her own but especially Richard’s private feelings toward Jews, feelings that were often in conflict with their public actions.
Cosima’s own paradoxical feelings are exemplified by a comment in her diary on G. E. Lessing’s play about religious tolerance, Nathan the Wise, which, she wrote, “reminds one of the businesslike attitude of the Jews toward their God.” This is immediately followed by an entry in which she noted how a Jewish saying had deeply moved her. Cosima was also apprehensive about Wagner’s decision in 1869 to republish the anonymous antisemitic essay Judaism in Music, this time revealing his authorship, and her diary chronicles the reactions to the publication, both positive and negative. Her account details the growing admiration for Wagner among activists in the antisemitic movement, which she sometimes expressed as a vindication of Wagner’s anti-Jewish pronouncements, as well as the harsh critiques and anonymous letters of protest. After Wagner’s death, Cosima became quite taken with the writings of Houston Stewart Chamberlain and engaged in lively dialogue with him about his theories on Jews. Chamberlain, a longtime admirer of Wagner’s antisemitic views, married the Wagners’ daughter Eva in 1908 and drew the attention of a young Wagnerite named Adolf Hitler.
Cosima’s writings also provide insights into Richard’s private musings about Jews, often revealing a deep-seated revulsion toward “Jewish nature,” but a revulsion sometimes commingled with admiration and even friendship. Cosima documented Wagner’s tutelage of Josef Rubinstein, who, in a state of mental instability, took up residence in the Wagner home in the hope of being “redeemed” from his burdensome Judaism; the close relationship and frank discussions with the conductor and rabbi’s son, Hermann Levi, and Wagner’s frustrated attempts to convert him to Christianity before Levi was to conduct the premiere of Wagner’s Christianity-based opera Parsifal; Wagner’s reluctance to speak publicly about the Jews because of his many Jewish admirers; and his more conciliatory sentiment, repeated in various formulations, that the Jews were not to blame but merely came on the Germans too early, before the Germans had sufficient selfawareness to absorb the Jewish influence.
Despite such moments of conciliation, Cosima’s testimonies also reveal the ulterior motives of such gestures, as when she attributed Wagner’s refusal to sign a petition to revoke Jewish rights to his conviction that he had already done his part for the anti-Jewish cause. Cosima’s diligence in recording her husband’s thoughts also provided access to some of his most destructive notions, including his fascination toward the end of his life with the concept of the Jews as a race, his basic endorsement of their total expulsion from Germany, and his most shocking antiJewish remarks in which, on hearing about numerous Jewish casualties in a fire in Vienna, he proclaimed that all Jews should be burned at a performance of Lessing’s Nathan the Wise.
—Pamela M. Potter
See also Antisemites’ Petition; Antisemitic Political
Parties; Bayreuth Circle; Chamberlain, Houston
Stewart; Hitler, Adolf; Judaism in Music; Marr,
Wilhelm; Volkisch Movement and Ideology;
Wagner, Richard
References
Gregor-Dellin, Martin, and Dietrich Mack, eds. Cosima Wagner’s Diaries. Translated by Geoffrey Skelton (New York and London: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978-1980).
Marek, George. Cosima Wagner (New York: Harper and Row, 1981).
Werner, Eric. “Jews around Richard and Cosima Wagner,” Musical Quarterly 71 (1985): 172-199.
World History
