Cosima Wagner

by Alice Hunt Sokoloff. Dodd, Mead, $7.50. Cosima was the illegitimate daughter of Franz Liszt and the wife (after scandalous uproar) of Richard Wagner. Her story is a temptation to sentimental melodrama which Mrs. Sokoloff does not always resist, although the general tone of the book indicates that she has tried to avoid excess in this line. The trouble is, Cosima, Wagner, and their circle rarely avoided excess, and readers without sympathy for nineteenth-century high bohemia may find this biography as trying as it is informative.