Cosima Wagner kept a diary for her children and presumably didn't intend it to be published, and perhaps that's how it should have stayed. A more dislikeable couple it would be hard to find; Richard Wagner moody and manipulating, flying off the handle over next to nothing, Cosima hanging onto his every word - he seems to have had an opinion on everything - and weeping and wailing over every perceived slight. The references to the staging and production of the Ring Cycle and Parsifal are interesting, but the Wagners' casual, condescending anti-Semitism made reading this book seem like hard work. ( )