Tuesday, July 6:
Thunder in the air; R. unwell, cannot work, I depressed. Grave discussion with R. about what I told him yesterday. I try to make him understand how, in my sense, the sacrifice of our happiness, indeed even of our life together, could never affect our love. He feels deeply hurt, but as always we have to admit, amid smiles and tears, that it is only the excess of our love which makes us so susceptible.
Played with the children; little work because of the sultriness. In the evening R. and Richter play Mozart's C Major Symphony as a piano duet, in the course of which R. gets very indignant about the faulty arrangement: "That is just like the Germans, always carrying on about Mozart, and then they produce such editions!"
Listening to the Andante, I found myself thinking of Beethoven, and I felt as if one might say to him, "Alas, alas, you have destroyed it, this beautiful world." But in his heart he built it up again. The gods have ceased their sweet and blessed playing, and instead of Paradise we have life, with all its terrible agony and the salvation which flows from it. There is no returning to Paradise, though there is to Heaven, and Mendelssohn, who perhaps flattered himself that he could restore the original state, is merely childish.
With Beethoven musical creation becomes human; Mozart is the world of animal, vegetable, and mineral, the innocent, naive world, unknowing both in gladness and sorrow; in the whole panoply Wagner appears as the revelation, as religion. In this history of creation the venerable Bach appears somewhat like the entire planetary system, before it separated itself from the sun. On such levels there is, however, no place for the gnat Mendelssohn to vaunt himself.
Good night, my children; good night, Hans; a very good night, my Richard! Today I really came to understand the idea of metempsychosis. I felt the need for atonement; it was a kind of consolation to tell myself that I should one day have to atone for the suffering I have caused by other means than sympathy and mourning, and yet no atonement can weigh more heavily on me than the knowledge of my guilt and my powerlessness to redeem it.