REMARKABLE LOVE STORY OF LISZTS DAUGHTER

Star (Christchurch), Issue 19118, 10 July 1930, Page 10

REMARKABLE LOVE STORY OF LISZTS DAUGHTER

Frau Cosima Wagner, the daughter of Liszt and widow of Richard Wagner, died at Bayreuth recently, says a writer in the “ London Daily Express.” She was ninety-three years of age, and had survived her famous husband by forty-seven years. She had a romantic history, and her marriage with Wagner was the climax of an extraordinary triple friendship between her father, Wagner, and Hans von Bulow, one of the most famous of German conductors. Her father, when a young man of twenty-four, and already a celebrity—the friend of Paganini, Berlioz, Chopin, George Sand, and many other notablemen and women—eloped from Paris in 1835 with Marie d’Agoult, daughter of the Count de Flavigny, and wife of Count Charles d’Agoult, Master of Horse to the Dauphin of France. The lovers went to Switzerland, and here their first child was born. Cosima, the second child, was born at Bellagio. on Lake Como, on December 25, 1837 Cosima, at the age of nineteen, married Hans von Bulow, then a pianist of the first rank, a pupil of Liszt, and, like Liszt, a great champion of Wag ner, then struggling against poverty and the furious hostility of most oi the musical world. A Strange Friendship. Von Bulow adored Liszt and called him “ Illustrious Master.” Liszt idolised Wagner, and Wagner wrote to Liszt. “ I regard you as my saviour himself.” Such was the extraordinary relationship between the three men, when von Bulow fell in love with Cosima who had come to stay with her father in Berlin. Four years after Cosima married von Bulow. She was staying in Bavaria, follow, ing the Weimar Music Festival of 1881, when her father, with Wagner, paid her a visit. Wagner had seen her oh her wedding journey at his house ih Zurich four years before. Now he fell’in love with her. “ He found .her,” writes M. Guy de Pourtales in his book, Franz Liszt, “shy and seductive. This ardent'and concentrated man of almost fifty, so unhappy in his own household, expanded in the company of this beautiful feminine Liszt, whose soul he divined that he had attracted just as he had captured that of her father.” Then, when Cosima was mourning for her -sister, she met Wagner in Leipzig, where von Bulow, her husband, was playing a new concerto by Liszt, her father. “Veiled in black, pale, Cosima seemed,” says M. de Pourtales, “to have come from another planet. The whole world outside became mere shadow.play for these two brings, who were already living entirely in one another. Yet they said nothing. Another Year Passes. “It was only on November 28 of the following year, in Berlin, through which Wagner was passing, that, seated side by side on the cushions of a landau, they made their avowals. “ Between Bulow and Wagner there had existed for almost twenty years a spotless friendship, and in the younger the same mad passion of adoration as in Liszt. But the time for resistance had passed.” Cosima had became Wagner’s secretary, and she now shared his daily life. Von Bulow ignored everything. “ unable to find any screen against the catastrophe which he tried not to see.” At last Cosima prepared to join Wagner in Lucerne. Bulow showed “ heroic fortitude.” There was a divorce, Cosima married Wagner at Lucerne in 1870, and when he died in Venice in 1883, it was thought, says M. de Pourtales, that Cosima would die, too. She recovered, and for more than forty years remained “ the vital heart of Beyreuth,” the shrine of Wagner.