Saturday, Mar. 10, 1923
Cosima Wagner
Frau Cosima Wagner--widow of the pre-eminent German musical composer, Wilhelm Richard Wagner, and daughter of Franz Liszt, of the Hungarian rhapsodies--is reduced to selling a number of her late husband's most valuable relics to keep the wolf from the door.
Paris newspapers have had a good deal to say about the shame Germany ought to feel for letting her sink to penury. The fame of both Wagner and Liszt is international, and if the companion of one and the daughter of the other is left in indigenous circumstances, should not the whole world be stigmatized as shameless?
Happily, reports have come to hand that many cities in Germany are giving performances of Wagner operas for the benefit of the widow. Vienna is also arranging similar performances in its great Operahaus, where Wagner first heard his Lohengrin.
Frau Wagner was Wagner's second wife. They had both been married previously, she to the composer von Bulow and he to Wilhelmina Planer, actress in the Koenigsberg theatre. Wagner died at Venice in 1883 and was buried at Wahnfried, near Bayreuth in Bavaria. It was there that King Ludwig rode alone in the dead of night to pay his last tribute to the great German.
Ignaz Paderewski has been playing at Los Angeles and elsewhere on the Pacific Coast.
Barbara Kemp, new soprano, made her second appearance at the Metropolitan in the first Lohengrin of the season.
Mme. Ganna Walska McCormick will make her long-awaited Chicago debut during the week of March 12, with the Russian Opera Company now singing there.
The Wagnerian Opera Festival, German company now touring America, will continue their performances at the Lexington Theatre, leaving the Manhattan Opera House, where they are now.
William B. Martin, Harvard '21, is reported to have signed a contract to sing star roles at the Opera Comique, Paris. He, say the critics of Paris, " may well be the world's new Caruso."