Thursday, December 25:
[In the margin: “Richard gives me the first act of Götterdämmerung, orchestrated!!!”]
Early in the morning I hear the children in the adjoining room singing the “Rose- und Kosenlied” so touching, so affecting! Then they come to my bedside, and Siegfried recites the poem to me! Deepest feelings of happiness, all outward things disappear, everything inside me speaks, a thousand voices rejoice in my soul, singing the song of love, like a thousand birds in spring, the one and only song!
The sun is shining. I ask R. to take me to the theater, and he does so. Planks bar the entrance to the stage; no watchman is on hand. I clamber over them, in spite of satin and velvet finery, and succeed amid great laughter in reaching the main stage. Grandiose impression: the whole rising up unrestrained like an Assyrian edifice, the pillars ranged like sphinxes below, the side wings spread out like secret passages. The whole thing seems more past than future, yet today it has a magnificently exhilarating effect on me. From the stage we then go down into the auditorium; the entrance to it makes a sublime effect such as no education can bring the onlooker. At once he will feel as if he is being inaugurated into the mysteries.
Lunch with the children, Lusch unwell; over champagne R. strikes up the song “Sagt mir, Kinder!” Before lunch, after the visit to the theater, we went to the new house and wandered, R. and I, in the conservatory; joy in the lovely plants, dreamlike gaiety. But it is for the children that we enjoy it; for ourselves the burial vault would be enough. Possessions do not become us; to find each other, to be all in all to each other, and to remain together in life or in death, that was our wish. But then came His Lordship Siegfried! “Eduard and Ottilie would also have contrived him one day,” R. says jokingly.
In the evening I ask him to play me the Idyll; we think of that morning in Tribschen, then of the Tristan time in Munich, all the bliss and all the sorrow. We go to our beds, I restraining by force my overwhelming emotion, laying the Idyll and the Koselied beneath my pillow before giving myself up to gentle slumbers. A happy day. My fate is not like Goethe’s, who enjoyed only four weeks of the happiness I know: my life, my lot is a happiness that outshines existence with all its torments, star of the deep!