Friday, March 14:
R. arrived home yesterday toward midnight and laughed to find me deep in the work of Palla[dio], which was giving me great pleasure. He was not dissatisfied with the discussions, but the tobacco fumes and the beer had given him a bad headache.
He tells me that Prof. Fries, probably only in order to reply to a privately expressed objection by Councilor K., asked him whether he did not feel the general public would be shocked by the ending of the first act of Die Walküre, where incest is proclaimed. R. at first replied jokingly, saying the experience in Munich had belied this, since the audience had broken out in enthusiastic cheers at the end of the first act, whereas subsequently, when the morality of the thing was being discussed, it had become bored. Then, becoming more serious, he said that this union of Siegmund and Sieglinde looks like an act of Nature, and it does in fact bring about everyone’s downfall, so that nothing immoral has been suggested.
I tell R. I cannot understand how people can think of things like that, and particularly how they can put them into words. He says: “Where understanding is lacking, words immediately take its place. For example, I have twice heard the word ‘sacrilege’ being used in situations in which it could not have sounded more idiotic, doubtless it had been borrowed from Robert le diable or some novel or other. The first occasion was at that awful time when Mathilde Wesendonck became jealous of my wife; I suggested to her that I should leave my wife and she her husband, and we would get married; she replied that this would be sacrilege. Incidentally,” he adds with a laugh, “the misapplied word suited my proposal quite nicely, for basically and in my subconscious mind I was not being serious! On the second occasion the word was used by another Mathilde, and it was in relation to us! ‘Sacrilege’ why not ‘wickedness’ or something like that? But no, it must be a word one does not understand.”
We were in the nursery around midnight; all were sleeping soundly, including Fidi. Doubtless today it was only a tooth coming through.
At lunch we come to the subject of the Leonore Overtures and the curious fact that Beethoven sketched four of them, indeed that he ventured at all into a territory, opera, of which he was uncertain. “I can understand this uncertainty,” R. says. “Even after the Tannhäuser Overture I had the feeling: My God, if somebody were able to come and prove to you that it really could be done quite differently!”
We go out together, first to the antiquarian’s, then to our house, and there he shows me the place where he wants our grave to be, where we shall rest side by side all by ourselves. Solemn and serene feelings, “undivided, eternally united!”
Before we went out I had been reading Elective Affinities, with indescribable emotion; we recall how we felt when separated, we had read at the same time the words, “But nothing compared with their contentment,” etc. “Yes,” says R., “you shared Ottilie’s inclinations, but I did not wish it so; and after all it is a very good thing to show the world that one is loyal to one’s love, and for two people created for each other to come together.”
At supper R. talks about Mendelssohn and praises his Hebrides Overture: “He listened well and received impressions of a landscape, for instance, at the beginning of the Overture the building up of the triad is full of atmosphere, but it is not the human heart and its sighing which he has reproduced, or Nature itself, but a landscape. And I can never think of a character like his as being capable of rapture.”
In the evening we finish reading the Malavikagnimitra with the utmost enjoyment: wit, invention, grace, life, and fine customs, everything about it is captivating.
Sweet leave-taking from R. for the night, he says a thing like our union will never again occur on this earth.