Friday, February 14:
(Morning) with the children, fetching them from school, throwing snowballs, and sleighing. R. returns home at noon and says he has just heard that my father is to give a concert for Robert Franz. This support for R. Franz is being staged by the musical bigots as a demonstration against Bayreuth; we ask ourselves whether we should go to Pest as planned, since one feels truly ashamed, expecting the Hungarians to do so much for German culture.
Gloomy thoughts about my father’s compliancy, he refused Heckel’s invitation to play in behalf of Bayreuth, but he will do it for Franz, for whose benefit a great deal is already being done. R.’s main pleasure lies in his books; he showed me Prof. Bachofen’s Tamquil and said how interesting it was to pursue the Oriental traces in Rome. “What a world that was!” he exclaims. “What does ours look like beside it?” The difference between the classical and the medieval conceptions of the witches’ Sabbath R. finds splendidly illustrated in the two watercolors we possess, file’s Tamhduser and Genelli’s Dionysus.
In the evening we read Calderon’s Fa divina Filotea and have to admire its artistic power, while at the same time deploring that this should be put to the service of casuistical subtleties.