Cosima Wagner

Cosima Francesca Gaetana Wagner (December 24, 1837 - April 1, 1930) was the daughter of the virtuoso pianist and composer Franz Liszt. She became famous as the second wife of the German composer Richard Wagner and, after his death, as director of the Bayreuth Festival for 31 years.

She was born out of wedlock, at Bellagio, Italy, to the Countess Marie d'Agoult, an author using the pen name Daniel Stern, a long-standing mistress of Liszt. In 1857, Cosima married Hans von Bülow, a piano virtuoso and teacher and orchestral conductor. Her father, Franz Liszt, had introduced her to Richard Wagner in 1853. After marrying von Bülöw, she came into frequent contact with Wagner, himself 24 years her senior and still married to Minna Planer. They became intimate in 1863, and in 1866, they set up house together in a villa at Triebschen, paid for by King Ludwig II of Bavaria, on the shore of Lake Lucerne, Switzerland. Cosima already had two children from her first marriage, and her future children by Wagner - Isolde, Eva and Siegfried - were born before she married him. From 1869 to 1883, she kept a detailed diary of their daily life together, which was later published. Although her mother was a descendant of well known Jewish family Bethmann, Cosima was a notorious anti-Semite, even much more than Wagner. She directed the Bayreuth Festival from the death of Richard Wagner (1883) until 1906, when she retired for health reasons. During her tenure, she insisted that the staging of the 1876 premiere performances be strictly adhered to. Her son, Siegfried, carried on this rigid "Bayreuth style" until the outbreak of World War I in 1914, when the Festival stopped operating. When the Festival re-opened in 1924, it was under the direction of her son Siegfried. She died at age 92 at Bayreuth.

References

George R. Marek: Cosima Wagner. New York: Harper & Row, 1981. ISBN 0-06-012704-X
Grove Encyclopedia of Music