Thursday, March 13:
R. had a good night, thanks be to God! But Fidi is ill, a warm forehead and fast pulse. R. sorts through his books and shows me, among other things, Maximilian’s Prayer Book by Dürer; I remark that I had once brought it to him in Munich to show him and left it there, he declares that he never even looked at it: “At that time I was angry with everything that was supposed to take my mind off the one and only thing, and I didn’t want to have anything to do with it.” Now he looks at it, and with very great delight: “Dürer and then Bach and Beethoven, those are our German characters.”
R. suddenly asks himself how Bach would have listened to such a good symphony. I suggest: with the feeling that he could have done it himself. R. says he understands very well what I mean, “for convention in Bach’s time was somewhat different from that in Mozart’s. For Bach it was religion, ritual; raising himself up to this form out of four-part music was to create a whole new world.” Gladness over Lulu’s and Boni’s health, sorrow over Fidi’s. Great melancholy over a poor, handsome, and good-hearted bookbinder’s assistant who will probably die on account of having made a journey home on foot, because of poverty, thereby bringing on pneumonia. R. is reminded of Pohl, his poor, faithful dog in Munich, who died on account of an overlong journey!
R. at the Thursday gathering, in Councilor Kraussold’s house opposite; I alone, writing. Lulu practicing the piano, all asleep, Fidi too. Melancholy thoughts, but great peace, all desires stilled, not really a single wish remaining; gratitude, a feeling of utter gratitude!
Yesterday I asked R. whether he thought the Vikramorvasi would be good adapted as an opera text and set to music. “No,” he says, “it would have to be done for a Court of a kind we no longer possess.” In the Malavikagnimitra we are fascinated by the descriptions of Court etiquette. “Everything which we nowadays claim to be original is reflected here, but how stiff and crude Louis XIV seems in comparison!” When I express my surprise at the freedom of the women, R. says, “Wherever there is a Court such a relationship will be found, and this is as it should be, only in the French does one find it repugnant.”