Sunday, November 19:
At midday Richard brings me his completed second act and says, “Now I have written you one act every year.” Great joy!
The snow lies thick around the house, but the sun shines and so we can go for a walk. Thought of Christmas. In the evening R. suddenly says to me, half joking: “I should still like to meet a magician, I understand magic making, I often have the feeling I could do it myself, like, for example, in certain conditions jumping over a huge distance. And my music making is in fact magic making, for I just cannot produce music coolly and mechanically. Even the soprano clef of a five-voice piece by Bach upsets me, I feel like transcribing it, but in a mood of ecstasy I can lead my voices through the most hair-raising contortions without a moment’s hesitation; it all pours out so steadily, as if from a machine; but I can do nothing coolly.”
He says what he would now like to do is to write his essay on Weber’s statement about Beethoven. “I recently read that Hanslick had spoken of Beethoven’s naïveté. A donkey like that can of course have no idea of the wisdom of genius, which, though it comes and goes like lightning, is the highest there is. One could, rather, call Mozart naive, because he worked in forms he did not create himself—only what he said within them was his own. The wisdom of genius is of course entirely spontaneous, not considered. But what do these people know of the enraptured state of a productive artist?” In the evening Plato.