Friday, April 5:
I dream of a great ovation for R. in Berlin. R. is fairly well, but his work gives him no pleasure. “And how could it?” he says. “I always have three things in front of my eyes: the King, who is only waiting for the works to be finished in order to desecrate them; Schott, who is demanding the copyright in order to sell them to the theaters; Weber, who wants to publish the texts as he pleases. So I would rather destroy it all.”
When I beg him again to write to Bismarck, he is not averse to the idea, and thinks of breaking off his work entirely. We go out together; in the post office we find very splendid letters from Herr Feustel and the mayor, which R. immediately sends to Councilor D. They say that in the Bayreuth newspapers not a word has been said about our house, which so bothered the King! The old story.
In the evening we read some of Somadeva’s fairy tales. Talked again a lot about the visual arts. A panegyric of Frau Wille’s novel by Herr Lübke in the A.A.Z. displeases us greatly; the feature of the book which we had suspected, namely, that she did not dare admit the deep influence exerted on her by Tannhäuser, but ascribed it to some ancient church music, becomes a certainty in our minds, and it angers R. extremely.
“Nothing Frau Wesendonck does surprises me,” he says. “She is weak in the head and has never known what things are all about; but from Frau Wille this is treachery, a cowardly and infuriating act of treachery designed to disarm the critics.”