Saturday, October 4:
R. dreamed that he was in his theater, surveying from the princes’ gallery the whole lovely, completed auditorium. “How will we feel when we come to the performances?” he asks. “After all that has gone before, one is so tired that one has no feelings at all — one is in a complete dream state, as I was when I sat in the King’s box at the first performance of Die Meistersinger.”
While we are talking about the old Nordic sagas, R. says he knows what Odin whispered in Baldur’s ear, that insoluble riddle: resignation, the breaking of the will — the ethical theme of Der Ring des Nibelungen.
R. works, and during his work comes to the following conclusion: “There are two ways of looking at the orchestra: as a homophonous body in which one instrument stands in for another; or my way, where every instrument is regarded as an individual standing by itself; that is why I am so annoyed when an instrument does not possess a particular note.”
Fidi in front of the two busts of R. (Kietz and Zumbusch): the two of them are dead, and then they meet. R. told me he did not wish to have a second son, for if he did not turn out to be like Fidi, how terrible that would be — “and one can hardly expect a repetition.”
R. visits the theater and returns home in silence — the workmen are making no progress with the shell of the building! The worker who fell from the scaffolding did not die, but he is much mutilated.
In the evening the Saga of Hrolf Kraki in Uhland. Great delight in it; superiority, the virtue of the Germans. R. observes that Bruno Bauer was right to point out in his study of the Jesuits that the Jesuits were unable to get the better of this superior people. “They have always carried their Valhalla deep in their hearts.”
“Much patience and a little crying,” according to Charles V, the only remedy for gout; R. puts it forward as a remedy for life — one should cry a little at times! This quotation brings me to Titian’s portrait (Charles V in Madrid); difference between the painter and the dramatist: we know Falstaff and Hamlet thoroughly, but cannot visualize them; the painter sees, propounds, and solves a riddle.
In the evening R. declares that he hardly hears me when I am reading: he watches me and is enchanted. “How happy we are!” he exclaims. . . .