Patrick Carnegy, Reckoning up the ‘Ring’: A Mathematician’s Diary of Bayreuth 1876

July 2014, Volume 8, Number 2, 52–8.

It’s always exciting when a previously unknown account of the Ring’s parturition at Bayreuth in 1876 comes to light. And of special interest when the witness turns out to be Alfred Pringsheim (1850–1941), father-in-law of that great Wagnerian, Thomas Mann. Although Pringsheim’s day job was as a professor of mathematics, a field in which he achieved considerable distinction, he was a pianist of near-professional standard. Around 1863 he was swept away by a performance of Tannhäuser and Wagner became a lifelong passion. The eighteen manuscript pages of the diary recording his attendance at rehearsals in the Festspielhaus from 5 to 21 July 1876 contain no major surprises but are of great interest none the less. For the 25-year-old Pringsheim tempers his passion for the composer and his music with a clear-sighted critical perspective.