Friday, June 25:
Still wretched nights, reflecting on my situation, my obligations; since personal sacrifice caused me no difficulty, it seems my life’s test consists in having to offer up another life besides my own at the same time, a superior one! I got out of bed and was carried by R. into the garden. Great weakness.
We spoke about Lohengrin. He told me that in the year ’48 Röckel said to him, “What we now need is a sort of popular anthem.” “Well,” said R., “I have a theme,” and sang him the motive from the March in the third act of Lohengrin. Röckel found it too artificial, however. R. says he was right; one can tell that it comes from an artistic work.
I told him then that I had first recognized the greatness of his art in this March and in the trumpet calls in the second act. When, utterly annihilated by the conclusion of the scene between Lohengrin and Elsa, I had come to believe that I could not possibly follow the further development, the trombone sounded, a somber, subterranean signal, so to speak, that he would give her an answer. Immediately following that, the bright trumpet calls, gripping my attention, and the art of music helped me over the shattering effect of the drama.
In the same way, when in the second act Ortrud enters Elsa’s dwelling and Telramund declares that calamity is now entrenched in the house, the morning calls of the trumpets, with their natural sounds, at once provide the soothing effect which Nature always brings to a troubled mind.
After all this, R. says that the Berlin Academy should have nominated me, for he has now been officially informed that he is a member of this somewhat superfluous institute.
A letter to me from Marie Muchanoff demands Die Walküre for Dresden, where Count Platen, the manager, is deporting himself very well. I have to inform her that the Nibelungen belongs to the King of Bavaria, which brings us back to the subject of the King, and R. once again asserts that without the King he and his works would no longer exist.
In the course of the day I have to return to bed, but all the same I spend a lot of time with the children. Another thing R. told me at lunch: “You are my idol, and it has certainly never happened before that a woman has so entirely fulfilled a man like me, has become virtually everything to him.”
In the evening read Goethe’s Conversations with Eckermann with ever-increasing pleasure. “All noble things seem to sleep until they are aroused by contradiction.” What particularly pleases R. is that Goethe always places the significant personality in the forefront and wins sympathy for the works through this, as, for example, with Molière. In contrast, says R., one sees how little one nowadays cares about outstanding individuals in the fact that so many books go out of print, e.g., Riemer’s Lexicon, Grimm’s German Grammar. The practical results of these books are brought together in others, and nobody cares whether he is hearing the words of an intelligent man or not. “All just railway-carriage reading!” says R.