Saturday, July 13:
Again and again R. comes back to the pleasures of literary work. “The fact that Lessing, Schiller, Goethe were melancholy would be incomprehensible if one did not know that they were possessed by an artistic urge which could not be developed in their own lifetimes. That is what makes them tragic; but otherwise literary work is a pure joy.”
Worked with the children; in the afternoon and evening the Feustels, also J. Rubinstein, arriving from Munich.
The latter’s piano playing pleases us greatly. In particular, a fugue by Bach from the 48 Preludes and Fugues, D-flat Major, puts us into ecstasies: “It is as if music were really being heard for the first time,” says R.
When I tell R. that this scherzando has filled me, curiously, with tremendous melancholy, R. says: “I can understand that; it is like a restless forward striding, as if he were saying: ‘Here you have everything with which you will later work, where you will lie down and rest; I know it all already, I must go on.’ A sphinx, but that is German. How shallow and conventional does the sonata form, that product of Italy, seem in comparison! It was only by breathing such tremendous life into the accessories of this form that Beethoven brought music back close to Bach. One hears in it the lament of Nature, animals and plants.”
For me it is, rather, the inorganic world, stones and mountains, which I hear calling.
Letters from Marie M. and Malw. M.