Hans Rudolf Vaget, ‘Es lebe Amerika!’: Richard Wagner and the United States

November 2023, Volume 17, Number 3, 4–24.

On 1 February 1880, Cosima entered into her diary what is surely one of the most baffling items in her faithful and invaluable recordings of daily life at Wahnfried and elsewhere. Richard and Cosima Wagner had come to Naples for what was intended to be a year-long, restful sojourn in the pleasing climate of the South, far from Bayreuth, far from their exhausting struggle to secure the continuation of the Bayreuth Festival beyond its first season in 1876. That struggle engaged not only the bureaucracy of the Bavarian court but also King Ludwig II himself. Lodging at the Villa d’Angri overlooking the Gulf of Naples, Wagner turned to the completion of his autobiography and Parsifal, which he knew would be his final operatic work.

In these circumstances, we would expect him to have been entirely absorbed in those two tasks. Instead, Cosima reports something entirely different and unexpected.