Tuesday, March 11:
R. had another bad night and is run down, but all the same our conversation at breakfast is cheerful, even lofty; he again touches on the Seventh (A major) Symphony and says: “It is quite wonderful how, due to their separation in time, the same original thought has appeared under two different guises. For me this work is a complete portrait of a Dionysian festival. One won’t, of course, think of that when one hears it, but if an imaginative composer had wanted to portray it, he could not have done it except in this way. At the start the herald and the tibia players, then the gathering people, the scale, after that the charming theme, whose swinging movement gives the idea of a procession, and so on. The Andante is the tragedy, the sacrifice of the god, memories of Zagreus, ‘you too have suffered,’ then the rustic celebrations, the vinegrowers and other country people with their thyrsi, and to end with, the bacchanale. But the music is, of course, very much more idealistic than any of that, and it would be silly to draw up a program; the picture emerges only in meditation and memory, and even in retrospect it remains utterly idealistic, it is not like a festival in which one is actually taking part.”
When I talk about the perfection of these symphonies as a whole, R. says, “Yes, the other great masters were still in the grip of convention; the Jesuitical style, which set its seal on architecture, also gave rise to the sonata form, and Mozart was too easygoing to break fully with convention.” R. gives me the conclusion of his wonderful essay to read; talking to me about it, he says, “I have the right to suggest certain alterations in places where even the best of performances cannot adequately bring out the melodic content, for in all else I insist throughout on correctness of execution and tell people that, if they understand and play only the nuances as indicated by Beethoven, they will find themselves on the right path.” Since he had left me, I sent him back the manuscript with a message that it was splendid; he tells me that the child said it beautifully.
But we are not allowed to spend too long on this delightful exchange of thoughts: Herr Am Rhyn is demanding more and more, supported by all the other rogues, and from Vienna the Academic Society reports that it will not be able to guarantee the sum (10,000) which R. asked for!
Yesterday we spoke of the stimulus the Schlegel brothers had given to Indian studies, and I asked R. whether the French and the English had not been before them in that. “Without a doubt,” he says. “They had possessions there, and in any case we can never pride ourselves on being ahead in anything; the honor of taking the initiative we must leave to the Latin peoples, but then one must look at what the Germans make of it all. They had no possessions which made it advisable for them to study, but it was they who discovered the basic relationship with their language and their spirit, and that no other nation succeeded in doing.” When he was speaking about Beethoven and some of the nuances which would have to be altered in performance, since Beethoven had been unable to hear them, I asked how it was with Weber. “Oh,” says R., “he was extremely careful, he had, I should say, a romantic acuteness.”
R. goes for a walk, returns home in the evening very tired; during the afternoon I had begun the Vikramorvasi, and in the evening I read parts of it to him; but he begins to feel weary, although the wonderful work impresses him, and goes to bed early. From Cologne Herr Lesimple writes to say they would be unable to bear the costs of the concert, but net receipts of 5,000 thalers could be expected.