Mi Vida

"You would give me inexplicable joy with a detailed description of your spiritual journey and also your outer life!" With these words, the young King Ludwig II of Bavaria asked Richard Wagner for the autobiography that would become one of the most unique and problematic documents of the 19th century. For fifteen years, between 1865 and 1880, Cosima von Bülow took dictation of the story of a life that spanned a Europe of revolutions, nationalism, and great aesthetic transformations: from Goethe's Germany to the unification of the Reich, from provincial theaters to the founding of Bayreuth. Wagner constructs a monumental self-portrait here, with the same passionate and profound power he poured into his operas, endowed with a majestic narrative rhythm that places it among the great autobiographies and masterpieces of world literature. This edition offers a complete and direct translation from German into Spanish, meticulously carried out by Rafael Antúnez, poet and doctor at the University of Córdoba. In contrast to the versions historically censored by the Wagner family--which for decades concealed indiscretions, softened judgments, and deleted compromising passages--we offer the complete text as it was dictated, restored from the original manuscript preserved in the Richard Wagner Archive in Bayreuth. The Bavarian State Library has defined it as "the most accurate biographical source on the composer, and practically the only reliable one for his childhood." An essential book for understanding not only the great genius that was Wagner, with his lights and shadows, but also our era and our present.