Monday, January 15:
Letter from Richter, saying that Hans was in Pest, looked very well, was very pleasant, and was perhaps playing even more outstandingly than before.
After we had been reading Schopenhauer yesterday, R. says, “A Bach fugue is like a crystal forming, then solidifying on the pedal point.” Then he said of Beethoven and Mozart, “As far as fugues are concerned, these gentlemen can hide their heads before Bach, they played with the form, wanted to show they could do it too, but he showed us the soul of the fugue; he could not do otherwise than write in fugues.”
Arrival of the manuscript of the 9th Symphony; infinite joy. This manuscript, well preserved by Schott’s, is now more than 40 years old, and now it has come into my hands! R. says jokingly, “You have stored up my whole life around me - without you I should know nothing of my life.”
R. works; he says he again has to write fateful episodes, which he cannot bear; things like the Lohengrin Prelude, the “Bridal March,” etc., he enjoys doing. The arrangements of the Five Songs for violin also arrive.
R. says: “With my so-called love affairs it was just as with my marriage; Minna married me when I was in a very wretched position, attacked even as a conductor, utterly without glory, and she was pretty and much sought after, but all the same I was quite without influence over her. And thus it was, too, with the other relationships, they all belonged in another sphere, and the only unaccountable thing about them is the power I exercised in passing, making Minna marry me, for example.” He then adds, “Incidentally, no one else would have suited or fitted me better; you were the only one who complemented me; with all the others I spoke in monologues.”
In the evening we read Schopenhauer, in great exaltation. [In the margin: “I ink in the sketches of the 3rd act of Siegfried.”]