Sunday, March 16:
Now it is my turn to be tired, but I pull myself together in order to walk in splendid spring weather through the palace gardens to the new house; great enjoyment among the children; then we returned home.
R. went looking for us, did not find us, whistled the first theme of the 8th Symphony, and had dressed himself handsomely for us, but in vain! Thus can people miss one another even in little Bayreuth.
At lunch Herr Zumpe relates that the musicians in Leipzig always used the quarrel motive in Die Meistersinger as a signal, and that brings us to this work, “the most optimistic of my works,” says R. “This is the form in which I visualized Germans in their true character, their best light, with a popular poet like Hans Sachs, an enthusiastic youth who, though not a mastersinger, feels poetically, and a respectable pedant. This is their level in life; everything else, elegance, for instance, is affectation; but their feelings are of the highest. Oh, yes, my dearest wife, that’s what I wrote at the time when we were so sad, but you were with me, and we felt that contentment of which Herr Goethe also knew something.”
Over coffee I read aloud the mason’s speech in Elective Affinities, and when I come to the place where Ottilie gives away her golden chain, I have to stop, for we are both in tears. “We are a prize pair of fools,” says R. . . . This morning R. was much amused to see his pamphlet Judaism in Music advertised as a rare antiquarian object at six times its original price.
As I was singing a theme today, R. asked me who had written it; when I say Chopin, he regrets that he himself plays the piano so little, for in consequence all these things have remained virtually unknown to him. “By merely being heard,” he says, “they have not impressed themselves on my mind; they dissolve like a beautiful sunset, arouse feelings in me but no reflections, no questions about where they came from, as with the things of the truly great.”
R. is pleased with his books, particularly with the newly arrived mystics. “The mystic is the man for me, even if he is mistaken, the man who feels the urge to ignite for himself the inner light in contrast to the outer brightness which shows him nothing; the name of Illuminati was for this very reason aptly chosen. Only, as Schopenhauer rightly says, one must be able to strip off the layers which the catechism spreads over such natures.”
Fidi is somewhat better and we enjoy a good and harmonious family lunch.
In the evening we read Elective Affinities with ever-increasing admiration for this incomparable masterpiece; the conversation between Eduard and Mittler gives R. much pleasure. [An incomplete sentence omitted.] We go to bed much affected.
(In Mannheim Hohengrin has been performed uncut, which induces R. to write a little poem for Heckel.)