Human, all too human
When Friedrich Nietzsche first met Cosima von Bülow, heavily pregnant, in a white flowing dress on the shores of Lake Tribschen, he was instantly smitten. Richard Wagner had invited Nietzsche to his lakeside residence after meeting him in Leipzig a few months earlier. On arriving, the young philologist was shocked to find Wagner ‘living in sin’ with Cosima, expecting her third child to the composer despite being married to his conductor, Hans von Bülow.
Cosima had an exotic provenance. The illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt and socialite Marie d’Agoult, she had spent little time with her father growing up, but he ensured she had the best governesses and was educated at Paris’s most prestigious schools.
The twenty-four-year-old Nietzsche had never encountered a woman as confident, cosmopolitan, and sexually free
