Friday, February 27:
R. is still at work, but he also does a lot in connection with the house, which gives him pleasure. Fidi’s constant cheerfulness gives him much joy: “There is no ugly vanity, no arrogance, no wickedness in the wake of cheerfulness. Those qualities belong to melancholy, to lack of freedom.” “He will reap the harvest,” he says, looking at the house. “I am glad: he will have no longings for wealth and fine living and will be able to despise all outward things.” Today, when I pose a riddle to the children - “When I bring it about, I bring it about, but if not, it happens just the same” - Fidi guessed “an accident,” which did rather amaze us. In the evening Gibbon.
Saturday, February 28:
R. is still busily at work. Friend Feustel is working out a contract with Professor Hoffmann, who expects to have his work completed by 1875; but there can be no question of that. In the morning I walk to the house with the children; in the afternoon R. works. In the evening he reads to me some of the Gallicisms, which make one wonder what will become of the German language. Also read Gibbon. Over coffee we once more talked about the Nibelungenlied, and R. said, “A poet literally grows with his task as Shakespeare did in Antony and Cleopatra; in the beginning he is just compiling, but then he sees more and more of the tragedy in it.” Incidentally, the dean recently pleased us greatly - when he was talking about rare impressions which he had had and which made an immediate impact on him, whether in music, painting, or literature, by quoting the scene in which the wounded Antony has himself carried up to Cleopatra. “This shows,” R. says to me, “what repressed fires and emotions lie concealed in our friend.”
Sunday, March 1:
R. tells me two dreams he had last night; in one, in alarm, “My God, have I given you any money?” She, in a friendly manner: “So you think of that now!” Then a cordial parting, he, however, saying to himself, “You will be able to tell her better in writing that we cannot go on living together.” The second dream was set in Paris, in the foyer of the Grand Opera, where R. was to produce and conduct one of his works, and he was received scornfully by the members of the orchestra. One of them: “I suppose you think you write pretty things and will please the audience.” “I suppose you want to perform your work here!” R. seeks to pacify them by saying he has never tortured an orchestra, but they will not listen. When it is time to begin the rehearsals, he loses his hat and looks for it, and amid mocking laughter the members of the orchestra bring him all kinds of children’s hats - then he woke up.
I go to church; the hymn O Haupt voll Blut und Wunden, followed unfortunately by the sermon. R. works. At lunch the Macedonian, to whom R. addresses some remarks on tempo. “Of course,” R. says, “one must have some idea of it; one must know, having heard it done well and then badly, that they are not the same thing.” In this regard the metronome is of no use. [An untranslatable witticism omitted?] When the stranger has departed and R. and I embrace, he says to me, “You are unfadingly beautiful!” In the morning he told me that Minna had once threatened to publish her memoirs, which makes me laugh a lot. When he is talking about tempo, he again tells how Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient had come to a rehearsal of Guillaume Tell and asked him please not to take the Tyrolienne so fast. “She could not bear slapdash work,” says R. In the evening we intend to put the etchings in order, but we do not succeed, and return to Gibbon.