Wednesday, July 24:
Fidi with us as usual at breakfast. “Turn out humorous and kind, then I shall be satisfied,” R. says. “Whether you will turn out a great genius straightaway, we shan’t inquire.”
“So now, after all, I have set this whole poem to music from beginning to end; previously I never believed it, not only on account of the impossibility of performing it, but also my inability to remain so persistently in the right mood. But I did remain in it: right up to the last verse I was as moved by it as at the very first word.”
“I have been thinking whether I should not become choirmaster here, learn the organ, and play it, in order to be of some use to the people. For it is here, from the friends I have gained here, that I now expect everything, not from what is perhaps being arranged for me outside.”
I go into the garden, the girls before me, Fidi beside me carrying his large book. From the balcony R. calls, “Pythia with the acolyte, who is bearing the prophecy.”
R. said to me at lunch, “If things go well with me, I do believe it won’t be long before I start on Parzival.”
He has been making corrections in his biography; when I tell him that I have written to Franziska Ritter, he is literally startled, for he says he had just been thinking of her and the R[itter] family and wanting them to know that he has completed Götterdämmerung. “We don’t need to talk to each other any more, you know and guess it all.”
In a constant state of bliss at the thought of the completion of Götterdämmerung, I read Goethe’s dedication and then the two prologues to Faust. When I tell R. of my rapturous feelings regarding these, he says, “Yes, all the art of the future is connected with the Prologue on the Stage; it is all in there.”
I go to my bench; “Pythia in the morning, Sappho in the evening,” R. says as he comes to visit me there, and, since Herr Rubinstein has brought the Ring des Nibelungen with him, he reads aloud the scene between Wotan and Brünnhilde at the end of Die Walküre.
The Nibelungen of Hebbel and of Jordan, which R. had ordered, have arrived, and they appall us; they could ruin the whole subject for one, I tell R. “Yes,” he says, “in the same way that Les Huguenots turned ‘Ein’ feste Burg’ into an ugly grimace.”