Monday, December 29:
At breakfast we range over wide territories, from Jean Bart and Duguesclin, R.'s favorites, to the Venetians, whom R. also loves exceedingly, and finally to our theater; complaints about the indifference of the Germans: “They do not know me,” says R. All the same, I say, they should have gained enough knowledge from their pleasure in bad performances of Lohengrin and Die Meistersinger to want to find out what is going on in Bayreuth. R. thanks Hermann and speaks of people's “malicious faintheartedness”; all the same, he says, he has now, toward the end of his life, found complete satisfaction and pleasure, if only he had not committed the stupidity of this undertaking.
Our musicians in the evening, R. goes through the second act of Tristan with R[ichter], unutterably moving. In the course of it I feel how remarkably soothing art is, it is as if in its sounds all suffering is sublimated, dissolving like smoke in flame. Oh, could the soul but transpose itself thus into sound! Dr. Glatz makes a good impression, but it is R[ichter] who pleases us most, with his primitiveness and his practical talent.