After all, nothing is so unbecoming in an artist as slipping away without leaving a few quotable.'' Have Schuppanzigh or Grillparzer spread the tale that the wine arrived as I was dying and I said something like, 'Ah, a pity, too late.' That will do unless I think of something better in the next few moments. Break it open and let's see how long it takes you to pour it all into me, every drop. Has that case of wine from my publisher arrived yet? Ah, good. Oh, yes, tell my shiftless nephew Karl that I forgive him for forcing me to destroy his life. Poetic truth is more truthful than history anyway. Ask Schindler or some other toady to put in his memoirs that I did so. Ludwig van Beethoven: ''My goodness, is that a fierce electrical storm I hear raging outside? I wish I had the strength to raise my fist aloft in a characteristic gesture of defiance. Ah, what lovely embossed wallpaper.is it paid for?.''įranz Liszt: ''If I die during a performance of the 'Ring' at Bayreuth, please don't tell me until it's over.'' Our disciples will surely try to chisel every word onto stone tablets. Your Richard talked inspired nonsense much of the time, but that is no reason to preserve his least musings in laborious detail. And, faithful wife and tireless scrivener, do not under any circumstances publish those understandably worshipful but rather elephantine diaries of yours. Although he is our son, he is incredibly untalented. Also, Cosima, promise you will make Siegfried give up trying to compose and conduct. Destroy them before that madman Nietzsche gets his hands on them and publishes one of his diatribes against what he calls my enfeebled, religion-besotted brain. Somewhere, perhaps under that pile of loan applications and bills for silk dressing gowns, you will find my drafts of operas on the subjects of Buddha, Jesus, Mohammed and Meyerbeer. The moment has come for my death in Venice, if I may coin a phrase. Richard Wagner: ''Cosima, my dear, draw closer. Here, in their own words, are authentic final statements from original oral-history sources. In certain instances the results are fragmentary because of technical difficulties in transmission, but any music lover will find them of medium interest, at least. They did, however, wish to speak, to correct or amplify the record in respect to deathbed epigrams that somehow had been overlooked - or perhaps suppressed - by the biographers and professional anecdotalists who always seem to be on hand when great artists abandon the material world. Unfortunately, they were not in a mood to convey unpublished masterworks to me. Seated one day at the piano, weary and ill at ease, I passed my fingers idly over the keys and soon found myself in touch with several of the same people who had contacted her. Recently, however, I had a sobering experience that made me wonder if I had misjudged Rosemary Brown and her clairvoyant talents. There was a time, I confess, when Miss Brown's spooky claims, not to mention the quality of the music she published as a result of her seances, aroused nothing but scorn in me. She became especially chatty with Chopin, who once broke off dictation to warn her of an overflowing faucet in her home. An amateur pianist, she had entered into communication with Mozart, Liszt, Beethoven and others of like fame, all of whom transmitted posthumous works and sometimes friendly messages through her.

SOME YEARS AGO, YOU MAY OR may not remember, hard-nosed skeptics throughout the musical world diverted themselves immensely by making fun of a British medium named Rosemary Brown.

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