Cosima Wagner - Legacy

Legacy

Cosima's life mission was total service to Wagner and his works; in the words of the music critic Eric Salzman she "submitted herself body and soul to the Master". In Wagner's lifetime she fulfilled this purpose primarily by recording in her journal every facet of his life and ideas. After his death the journal was abandoned; she would henceforth serve the master by perpetuating his artistic heritage through the Bayreuth Festival. Guided by Groß, but also using her own acumen—Werner calls her a "superb business woman"—she succeeded in making the festival first solvent, then profitable.

While acknowledging that Cosima was an effective "keeper of the flame", commentators have criticised the nature of her legacy. The Ring historian J.K. Holman describes it as one of "stifling conservatism". Her policy of sticking to Wagner's original stage conceptions was not fully abandoned until after the Second World War, when a new generation took charge of the festival. Hilmes likens Cosima's role to that of the abbess of a religious community: "a cohesive, quasi-religious congregation of Bayreuthians sharing a common philosophical outlook". Anti-Semitism was integral to this philosophy; although in 1869 Cosima had opposed the re-publication of Wagner's anti-Jewish treatise Jewishness in Music, this was on grounds of commercial prudence rather than sensitivity. In 1881 she encouraged Wagner to write his essay "Know Thyself", and to include in it a tirade against Jewish assimilation.

The critic and occasional librettist Philip Hensher writes that "under the guidance of her repulsive racial-theorist son-in-law ... Cosima tried to turn Bayreuth into a centre for the cult of German purity." Thus, he continues, "By the time she died, Wagner’s reputation was ... at the forefront of a terrible political dynamism: antique stagings of his works were presented to audiences of Brownshirts". The close association of the festival with Hitler and the Nazis during the 1930s was much more the work of Winifred—an overt Hitler supporter—than of Cosima, though Hensher asserts that "Cosima was as much to blame as anyone".

In the immediate aftermath of Cosima's death, some writers heaped copious praise on her. Ernest Newman, Wagner's biographer, called her "the greatest figure that ever came within circle"; Richard du Moulin Eckart, Cosima's first biographer, introduced her as "the greatest woman of the century". In time judgements became more measured, and divided. Marek closes his account by emphasising her role not only as Wagner's protector but as his muse: "Without her there would have been no Siegfried Idyll, no Bayreuth, and no Parsifal". Hensher's judgement: "Wagner was a genius, but also a fairly appalling human being. Cosima was just an appalling human being." In 1977, 47 years after her death, Cosima's urn was recovered from Coburg and buried alongside Wagner in the Wahnfried garden.