bavarikon4UDescription
In July 1865 Richard Wagner (1813-1883) starts his autobiography My Life at the request of King Ludwig II of Bavaria (1845-1886), his most important patron. He dictates it to his then lover and later wife Cosima von Bülow (1837-1930), whose work as the chronicler of his life begins here and ends twenty years later, on 12 February 1883, with the last entry in her diaries.
The records begin under the meaningful siglum "WRC" – Wagner Richard Cosima and describe Wagner’s life on 800 pages from his birth in Leipzig in 1813 to his meeting with Ludwig II’s envoy in Stuttgart in May 1864.
Despite its inherent subjectivity and some omissions out of consideration for Cosima, for example, little is learned about Wagner’s love affairs or his role and attitude in the March Revolution of 1848 and the May Uprisings in Dresden in 1849, My Life is the most accurate, and for his childhood practically the only reliable biographical source, which at times is not sparing in its self-irony.
My Life was never meant to be published. The first of the four planned volumes, covering the years 1813 to 1842, is published in 18 copies, which Richard Wagner sends to friends as a Christmas present in 1870, but asks them to return them the following month, fearing that sensitive passages might become public. It is not published in full until 1911.