Sunday, August 31:
The children to church, then with them to the new house. R. works and says at lunch that he enjoys what he is at present doing, a quartet accompanying a conversation, but when reason ceases and has to be replaced by musical ecstasy, that he finds horrible; now he can fit three groups of staves on one page, and that pleases him.
After lunch we finish Coriolanus in the garden, with indescribable emotion. I tell R. that whoever has not heard him read it does not really know the play, any more than one knows a Beethoven symphony without having heard it conducted by him. We come more and more to the conclusion that it is impossible to imagine these works just by reading them.
In the evening music with our copyists; Die Meistersinger and Faust overtures; then R. sings from Die Walküre. At the end of it we are all of the opinion that Die Walküre is the most emotional, most tragic of all his works, Tristan und Isolde is much more conciliatory, and in Götterdämmerung Hagen at least is a folk figure, which Hunding is not. “amoris,” R. calls out to me in the evening as he bids me good night, after lamenting that constant assaults from the outside world prevent his enjoying his happiness.