Saturday, March 1:
Splendid spring weather. I send the children off for a walk to the Burgerreuth, and I myself go for a walk with Fidi and Meyer, the laborer, who has recommended a cook to me. Nice meeting with the dean, who is as pleased as a child with Schure’s translated article and thinks we are at the point of victory over our enemies!
R. is now working on his essay on the Ninth Symphony and correcting the Rheingold proofs. I write to my father and make preparations, as far as I can, for R.’s birthday. Boni is still not well and must be looked after; I take her out for a while, but she finds walking difficult.
Toward evening I go out by myself, and, as the moon rises over the palace gardens, I hear a blackbird singing. Much moved. Good resolutions. Deep self-communion.
In the evening one of the copyists, Herr Zumpe, comes to visit. R. talks about the Italian company in Dresden and comes to the subject of Rossini and the Gazzetta Ladra Overture in particular. When our copyist admits with a smile that he does not know it, R. gets heated and says, “My dear man, only Beethoven stands above Rossini,” and he describes how Rossini’s music expresses the whole of elegant society, with its beautiful Italian women and their chatter. “Beethoven did not write music for any assembly, except perhaps for an assembly of gods.” He plays the Gazzetta Ladra Overture and then the A major Symphony, which Herr Z. is to conduct for the amateur society. After that some passages from the F major and the Pastoral; only two bars by this divine being are needed to transport us quite outside ourselves. What incomparable power! No such symphonies will ever again be written. R. says: “It must have been a splendid and exhilarating time for him when he designed the Seventh. He had probably overcome his grief about his deafness and come to the conclusion that nothing could ever get him down. But who ever thanked him for writing as he did?” Of all his works R. considers the Seventh and the Eighth incomparably the boldest and most original; but, he says, if he himself were ever to conduct them again, he would not hesitate to change some things in the orchestration, which Beethoven had written thus only because he could no longer hear it.