Tuesday, December 3:
R. is still not sleeping well and is very restless; he longs to return home in order to work on his score.
At eleven o’clock a visit from our friend Marie Muchanoff, just arrived from Bonn; she tells us about Countess Hatzfeldt, Lassalle’s mistress, who “out of a sense of fairness has now become a supporter of the clergy,” and about the aristocratic women who are sewing shirts for the Jesuits, etc.! She departs at one o’clock.
We at five to Bonn, to see La Muette de Portici there. Great disappointment with Herr Diener, whose voice is plummy and who now seems to us, among all the tenors we have so far heard, to be vocally the least gifted. How to tell this to the worthy man, who is nevertheless in great demand with all theater managers and directors?
The rest of the performance of La Muette even more absurd in all departments: the soprano enters during the trumpet solo, the tenor on the oboe, and thus throughout! In Cologne the conductor conducts Freischütz and Zauberflöte from the original scores of Weber and Mozart and imagines that in this way he is presenting an ovation to the master!!
Before we left for Bonn, a young woman, Müller, Marion, sang for R.; she is a German, now engaged at the French opera in Liège, but she has already sung Ortlinde in Munich under Richter. She manages the call and the trill, to R.’s delight, and appears to be a “good girl,” so that he will presumably make use of her. R. laughs and says: “I see from this what artists I have been reckoning on, even for the small parts. In my things they have to be able to do everything.”
We received tickets for a concert at Gürzenich Hall being given today. It required an extra sitting to decide where R. was to be put, since Herr Hiller feared he might feel inhibited by having him too close!