Saturday, May 3:
R. comes to me in the morning singing the “Prize Song”: “We have thought up some nice things together.” I: “But you also thought up some nice things without me.” “Those were just poet’s dreams, the muse of Parnassus.” He chides me fondly for loving my father too much!
Mannheim and Wiesbaden are asking for Tristan und Isolde; he intends to make permission dependent on the condition that they pay him royalties on all his works. R. tells me over lunch that Feustel’s son-in-law, Herr Gross, managed only with the greatest difficulty to get a seat in Vienna in the upper gallery, and that even this least knowledgeable of provincials had thought the performance very bad. R. laughs and says, “It really is an impossible situation; no manager wants to present my things, no conductor can direct them, no singer can sing them, the entire press despises them, yet the public clamors for them.”
After lunch R. speaks of my father, who does not have to do a thing, has just to be present to have all the women falling over him, whereas people like me always have to be noble. He hurts me very much by saying that I am in my element when I am with my father. Noticing this, he says: “All the things one says are foolish, a great deal of life has to remain unexpressed, like muddled dreams. We live in a state between waking and dreaming, and suffer from it until our union occurs and there is no more waking and dreaming. I am content if you glance into my heart and understand that my complaints come from the tenderness of love, and I suffer only when I think you are not sharing my feelings.”
Yesterday he promised to write the funeral march for Romeo and Juliet. Today is May 3; nine years ago yesterday Meyerbeer died, nine years ago today Pfistermeister came to R., and tomorrow, on the 4th, he was presented to the King. We think of Eisleben and its dilapidation, the old fountain particularly appalled R., looking as it now does like a sort of pig’s trough. We found the same baker’s shop, and he showed me the school, recalling that the teacher had eyes for a certain Demoiselle Oehler. The same bookbinder’s shop, too, and he also at once recognized the house in which he so often played; we went in, inquired after the family, and learned that only “the hunchbacked” woman was still alive, though living in another house.
Yesterday, when the mayor was admiring our building site, I reminded him that nobody had understood the choice before; he agreed, and said that he was constantly astonished by R.’s remarkable eye, how in all things he saw and stated what proved right. Our magnificent Mme. Lucca has written to the management of the Conservatoire in Milan, putting at their disposal a sum of 2,000 francs to finance a journey for the most talented of their young scholars; this scholar should learn how music is composed, conducted, and listened to in Germany, even if it is foreign music. An excellent idea, but what will the scholar be able to learn in Germany? In the evening our copyists; they play the Meistersinger Prelude and horrify R. with their broad, funeral-march tempo. “Oh, if the world only knew what one requires of it! That it should give one the means of no longer needing it.”