Friday, December 6:
Not a very good night, since we could hear the whistling of the trains, but we are glad to see nobody here and spend the morning peacefully writing letters.
R. is very nostalgic for home and the children and breaks out into complaints over the fact that, whereas his energies might, with very great exertion, suffice to produce his works, he now in addition has to bother himself personally about raising the means. He says, “I am too ridiculous with my Götterdämmerung, and then having to confer with Lesimple about my ideas.”
The news that Herr Reinecke, here from Leipzig to give a piano recital, lost all his music during the journey, which did not upset the audience since it meant he had to play Beethoven instead of his own things, causes us great concern with regard to Götterdämmerung, which we have brought with us. R. says, “What a laugh for Hiller and his consorts if I were to advertise the fact that this manuscript is irreplaceable: what jeering there would be!”
We spend the whole day at home, writing letters. R. goes out in the afternoon and returns home quite appalled by a beerhouse near the theater, in which he discovered two very disreputable prostitutes working as barmaids. What shocked him, he says, was that nobody thought anything of it; people had talked about their own affairs and ignored this vileness as if it were quite in order.
“It is terrible the way our women so innocently wear these means of provocation, chignons, etc., and nobody gets indignant about it! And where will it come from, here in our climate, this feeling for beauty, how can it develop here? The Greeks are an exclamation mark, the lotus flower in a pond in which frogs are now croaking, and with this we must be content! In the North sensuousness is so cold, so crude, and unimaginative. It really is disgusting.”
We learn through the hairdresser (!) that there is much grumbling in Hanover. The nobility has been replaced by bureaucrats, and the theater manager von Bronsart is said always to return half of the subsidy he receives from Berlin, a gesture which has indeed brought him a decoration! Busts of King Georg are still everywhere.
At 7 o’clock to the theater, where Oberon is being performed. Very fine auditorium; and a fine orchestra, but conducting and producing very bad. In this short score they cut an aria and a march, and the stage setting is worse than in the smallest of theaters. Orchestra arranged as it was 40 years ago, brass here, strings there, so that one can hardly hear the latter! And yet the manager, von Bronsart, was the man we ourselves wanted in Berlin, since we saw him as a very sensitive artist; he was a pupil of my father’s. Of course, he now has a non-German composer wife and works under Hülsen!
R. recalls the origin of Oberon, an English fairy play which Weber decided to set to music for the sake of the fee, knowing he was soon to die. “This is the way it has always gone for us Germans. But how touching is a work as delicate as this! One should try, on account of the music, to do all in one’s power to bring it to life, to present it beautifully, but not to stifle it with too much pomp! But there it is: during his lifetime they let him work for an English theater of farce, and after his death they accept his work as a masterpiece and fritter it away. Oh, Germany! But things won’t change.”
The music makes an indescribable impression on me, noble, virginal, naive, and pure; there is something of Schiller’s spirit in Weber, and in addition something joyful and gay. I told R. that, though I did not consider him to be a genius of the stature of Mozart, nevertheless he stood much closer to us. “Oh,” says R., “something quite new sounded in him: the German element; it coincided with the birth of national feeling, with romanticism, the cult of ancient Germanic art.”
In the evening the baritone Herr Staegemann visits us, and R. asks why it is that Die Meistersinger has disappeared from the repertory here, when previously Hanover had been one of the main centers for his works. R. says Herr von Bronsart declared to him that the work had not paid off even his advance of 50 louis d’or. The baritone singer explains it as being due to the illness of various singers and maintains that the work was performed 15 times in the first season. God knows who is telling the truth.
While in the theater R. was suddenly called away; a clerk from the telegraph office told him he wished at all costs to hand him a telegram personally, and he had run all the way from the hotel, just for the gratification of seeing him!