Daughter of Franz Listz, wife of renowned conductor and pianist Hans von Bulow, then mistress and second wife of Richard Wagner, muse of Friedrich Nietzsche. . . and that's just the first forty years of the life of Cosima Wagner (1837-1930).

This biography is almost entirely concerned with Cosima's first forty years. It barely covers the second (and probably more interesting) half of Cosima's life, in which - for better and for worse - she was her own woman, not daughter, wife, mistress, or muse, but ruthless and relentless guardian of Wagner's legacy and of the Bayreuth shrine and festival, where she surrounded herself with loyal Wagnerites, passionate nationalists, unabashed racists, and, in the 1920s, Nazis. There's no mention of anti-semitism in this book, so it's rather obviously a whitewash, but Cosima's life in her first forty years was fascinating enough and the details are so quintessentially a product of the romantic era that I can accept the biography for what it is.

A representative passage: "It is not surprising that Cosima was ready to go to any extreme through her love for Wagner. She had a strong and passionate nature that had been denied much of its normal expression through a difficult and deprived childhood. She had suffered humiliations of rejection by her parents. She had been made to feel the anomaly of her position as an illegitimate child by many people. . . When a woman of strong will and superior intelligence falls in love, she is very apt to go to extremes of devotion especially if she feels that the man with whom she is in love is superior to her in every sense, that he is someone to whom she can look up and who will challenge and engage every facet of her personality. In such a case, and with such a woman. she becomes an instrument of the man's destiny; the world exists only for him and through him everything becomes relative only to him; right and wrong, morality and immorality, honor and dishonor are real only in so far as they affect him. A whole new code of behavior and judgment comes into being wherein the first duty is toward the beloved and any means are allowed to this end." ( )