>On a typical evening at Tribschen Wagner and his wife ask, when the children are asleep, what book they should read together. Plato? Not yet bound. Schiller? Read him recently. Calderon? Shakespeare? Homer? 'We decide,' Cosima writes, 'on the last.' (I'm pleased at that, for Homer is far and away my favourite reading.) 'Most wonderful impression,' Cosima writes, 'a sublimely intimate evening, indelible images stamped on my mind. Untroubled sleep.'
>In the next day's entry she writes, 'The evening [is] crowned with four cantos from the Odyssey (Calypso, Nausicaa, Leucothea). Only distraction during the reading is watching R[ichard]'s fine, radiant countenance and delighting in the sound of his voice.' And on successive evenings she writes, about subsequent books of the Odyssey, 'Great delight ... The splendid happenings seem like a dream picture to me ... [Richard's] voice and his manner encompass the immortal work like music.
>One day, over lunch, Wagner rates Plato's Symposium above all other literary works: 'In Shakespeare we see Nature as it is, here we have the artistic awareness of the benefactor added; what would the world know about redeeming beauty without Plato?'
>One night they decide that there are seven great books. 'Over supper we discussed our indispensables and classified them thus: Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Plato's Symposium, Cervantes Don Quixote, the whole of Shakespeare, and Goethe's Faust.
>The theatre at Bayreuth is opened, and they move into Wahnfried, the house Wagner designed there for himself. Properly married at last, they now have a library of over two thousand books to choose from for their evening reading. They make their way through several books of Thucydides together. Wagner wants to contrast German politics with those of classical Greece. 'Ah, they were too intelligent, those fellows,' he says of the Athenians. 'They could not last.' One day Cosima finds him reading Sophocles Oedipus and checking the translation against the original Greek. 'It is a torrent of beauty,' he says, 'now vanished forever: we are barbarians.'
>A son is born, and they draw up plans for his future reading. Philosophy: Schopenhauer. Religion: Eckhart, Tauler. Art: R. Wagner. And then, much the same great-books program as before, climaxing in the big three - Homer, Aeschylus, and Sophocles.
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