Wednesday, July 31:
R. is somewhat disgruntled at having to concern himself with immature (“stupid”) people. “The only pleasure I get from my things is when I have written the sketch and sing it to you; after that it is all gone.” Loldi still indisposed; R. and I take up the biography again, on a wet morning.
At lunch we talk about the impossibility of making oneself understandable through speech; speech is a convention; only love, which overcomes egoism, or an exaltation gained through art, enables one person to understand another. “Your father and Princess W. understood me just as little as utterly stupid persons.”
Yesterday evening Herr Diener told us that Rubinstein wanted to build a theater of his own to perform five Biblical works. “Not very original,” says R., laughing, “but why do these good people always begin everything from the outside? I wrote my work first, then began to think about the means of performing it.”
We learn that during Joachim’s absence the Academic Wagner Society received permission to advertise its meetings on the staircase of the Academy; when Joachim returned, this was forbidden!
In the afternoon a visit from Herr Krausse, a historical painter from Leipzig, who reports that Wagnerianism has assumed enormous proportions in Leipzig.
In the evening the last scene of the second act of Die Walküre.