Friday, June 7:
A good night for R. I with the children in the garden. When I come home, R. says to me, “I am correcting ghost stories” (the last days in Zurich in the biography). Before lunch I hear him playing passages from my father’s Christus; what I have so far heard of this work makes no great impression on me. “That one can so use the resources of a great and noble art to imitate the blubbering of priests,” says R., “that is a sign of intellectual poverty.” We deplore this development in my father, for which Princess W. is certainly mainly to blame.
At lunch, speaking of yesterday’s meeting, R. says: “And so I have come back to the point from which I started; my childhood surroundings were like these people and these houses: plain middle class, with, if you will, a limited outlook, and yet vital and with a sound core. I could imagine my uncle Adolph here among us.”
When I remark that nothing really seems to grow in Bayreuth, that they send to Bamberg for all their fruit and vegetables, and add that all Protestant places, places to which people fled, as it were, appear to be raw and infertile, R. says: “Yes, and they spur people on; in places where Nature denies him much, the human being becomes significant and greater than Nature. The Athenians had unfruitful Attica, the unproductive soil raised their intellectual powers to the highest, and the Arians, returning from the mountains, found in the rich cradle of humanity people living almost like animals, while they, already developed, created Brahmanism as they dwelt in the rich valleys.”
The conversation flowed on, and R.: “Yes, one can only understand one’s life when one is older; when I think what it was that impelled me to sketch Tristan, just at the time of your first visit with Hans to Zurich, while up till then I had been calmly completing the two acts of Siegfried, and when I now look back at the whole chain of events up to the production of Tristan in Munich! In this one can see how everything is metaphysical, and how deceptive the things of which one is conscious can be. How different it will look to someone who can see the whole from the way it looked as it was happening! As with Romeo, the seed of a tremendous passion was being sown, and it appeared in the consciousness as a tenderness toward Rosaline. What is consciousness? The day following an often wretched night, and daytime ghosts! And it literally seems as if one can assume that Fate does take care of one, for, looking at my whole life, my marriage with Minna, does not everything look hopeless? And yet the miracle happened, though indeed in a different and more painful way than through annunciations and so on. And I know that, however pleasant I found this kind and sympathetic friendship, someone who would and could care for me, was always close to running away.”
We learn of the death of the conductor Esser, who was not old. “It all leaves one so cold,” R. says, “because one has always felt all these relationships to be incomplete.”
The Neue Freie Presse prints a fabricated letter to R. from V. Hugo, with the purpose of showing R. up as a charlatan, and with the remark that he enjoys the taste of Bavarian florins. Such things can still be said in a German land about the creator of Lohengrin!
Visit of Dr. Landgraf, as both physician and friend. In the evening played more of Christus, an impression mounting to disgust; R. is very shocked by the bad choral setting. Dr. Landgraf prophesies a long life for R. and says that age is relative and has nothing to do with figures.