Thursday, June 27:
R. reads in the newspaper that there have been uprisings among the workers in Vienna, and again it is the misguided poor people who have been punished and persecuted. “The demagogues, the ringleaders, should be trodden underfoot like vermin,” says R., very indignant that the misguided people are once again the victims.
Visit from the conductor Herbeck. Proposals for Vienna, inquiry whether R. would perhaps do Die Walküre there before Bayreuth, all of it nonsense.
Family lunch; the faces of musicians are discussed, and R. says the handsomest was Méhul’s. On my remarking that these French musicians, Grétry, Méhul, etc., were very gifted: “Oh, the French are significant, no question of that; what they lack is an ideal, something which, when it comes to the point, doesn’t concern itself at all with form, like Bach, for instance, who simply ignored the laws of euphony, which meant everything to the Italians, in favor of independence for his voices.”
R. has done some work, despite the interruption of Herr H. Walk with the children after the rain, renewed pleasure in the park: “If one could conjure it up with a wish, one couldn’t make it any lovelier.” In the evening took up our old Gibbon again and continued him, remarking as we did so that the English are much better and more original interpreters of Latin ways, their classical form and their settled outlook, than the French.