Tuesday, December 24:
With the children at the fair, while R. finishes his article. When I timidly ask him whether he ought to call everybody by name at this point, when he is hoping for help from the German Reich, he flares up. This is the only thing he cares about, he says: to express candidly his indignation about all the things that are bad, and the only people he will have anything to do with are those who share his indignation. I have to admit that he is right. “I am in a Kohlhaas mood,” he said. “Yesterday evening, while you were decorating the tree, I read the story again; how affecting it is!”
Recently he said to me: “If I had a question for the future, it would be this: Will anything still come of the Germans? Will they find their form? This question I find of boundless interest. For everything is so run down, so spoiled, and the more arrogant its behavior, the worse it is.”
R. goes to the theater site, returns very affected. It looks so noble, he says; now he is committed, no longer free, but fettered; his imagination and the faith of a few others have brought it into being and he cannot now turn back. He is very solemn. We light the tree at half past five.
The copyists are also there, somewhat trying, for the good people speak so little, but R. gives them a regular course in execution, with examples. He begins with Beethoven’s Vittoria, stressing the popular character of the theme: “To what shallow conversational levels did Mendelssohn then lead music back, after Beethoven had made it so splendidly popular in flavor!” Following that Egmont, then Zauberflöte, Euryanthe; the Egmont music moves me unutterably.
The people leave, the children thank us for the pleasure they have had, and then we are left alone, R. and I. He plays, I weep! My birth. Oh, could I but wipe it out and thereby end all the suffering it has caused! “From a father’s need and a mother’s pain...” “the old tune”; what do I not hear through my tears? Richard weeps, too, thinking of his “duty,” of his Kohlhaas mood: “I am so tired!”
Midnight arrives, and with it my birthday; tearful embrace; how gladly would we die!... The melancholy turns to cheerfulness as R. gets up and mysteriously presents me with a fan, which had pleased me in Strassburg, and a case for storing the manuscripts. He complains that his other presents are not yet ready. We laugh a lot, and my tears begin again only after I am in bed.