Thursday, November 13:
Reflections, worries. My work today consists of a letter to Archbishop Haynald, summarizing my feelings about the festival and my absence from it. (Attached to this entry is a newspaper clipping about the Liszt Jubilee in Pest on November 10.) A walk around noon. The house a torment for R.
In the evening, due to a misunderstanding, the dean and the consistorial councilor, who thought the Thursday gathering was in our house, came. R. had the copyists with him and went through the Egmont Overture and [Mozart’s] E-flat Symphony with them. Feelings of melancholy that so few people know his interpretations, and accordingly no tradition is built up. The character of the Egmont Overture is agitated accents throughout, though one must take care not to hurry it; everything must sing, but see that you do not fall asleep! In music one must always look for the melody, and if there is none, the music is bad. In cadenzas, formal phrases, one can never be too fast, etc.
R. discusses with the consistorial councilor the original form of the hymn, how much lovelier they used to be, what steadfastness of faith the people who sang them expressed, what scope for a free and completely folk culture lay within them! But now they had been invested with the i, 2, 3, 4 of a military march and had become completely trivialized. The dean tells us that for two days running, until half past one in the morning, the King sat in the opera house and had ballets and French pieces performed just for himself. Concerning a concert in Paris in which Pasdeloup played the Tannhäuser Overture, according to the writer, this produced a scandal, and a member of the audience commented, “The hisses were for the Prussian, the applause for the composer.”
Various enclosures, a French pamphlet about R., addressed “R. Wagner, Prussian, his admirer nonetheless”; also a German pamphlet, Socialism and Art, which describes R. as the final manifestation of aristocratic art. R. writes to Dufil to inquire whether the guarantee will be given. Hoffmann announces his arrival, and now one must decide whether one can go ahead with a commission. “The worst of it is,” says R., “that I cannot, like Luther, sing, ‘A mighty fortress is our God,’ for God cares little about art; it’s a matter of indifference to him.”
In the afternoon with R. to the house. Conversing in the evening and read Part Two of Faust. Wonderful impressions: creation of the Homunculus, the brevity of it, yet the wealth of wit; one does not need anything in it explained, so gripping is it. Also the Baccalaureus with Mephisto, splendid, all so human. Griffons and sphinxes, Chiron we also read with real enchantment - who will ever know enough of this work?