Wednesday, March 4:
“Help me to have a good day,” R. says early in the morning. Then he addresses the picture of his mother, before which I am lying: “What have you got to say,” he cries, “now that I have won this woman for myself?”
He then talks about a play in the manner of Die Kapitulation which he would like to write, in which all the literary figures would appear by name (Lucius Freytag, Fabius Rodenberg, etc.) with their manners of speech; and with them a peasant. “I only wish some theatrical genius would arrive who would describe all this plainly, sparing nobody, though not treating them as real persons. But the audience would not understand him anyway, for we have no public life, and these men are really just phantoms, they don’t exist for the people. In Germany you must shout from the rooftops, as I do; solemnity is the only thing which has an effect on the Germans, and music is the only arcanum.”
R. works; still no news from Munich. Since the weather is fine, I spend the whole afternoon in the new house with the children. In the evening the copyists and Herr Runckwitz; go through the Meistersinger Prelude, then the C Minor Symphony and Joseph, the last the object of much admiration on R.’s part. He tells how Simeon’s aria had gripped him as a young man. “He (Méhul) has taught us the art of letting something die away, the [word illegible], he uses it twice: after the father’s curse and after Simeon’s aria. Joseph’s entrance - that is true art. People were better than they are now - they enjoyed such things, and the period which could produce three such works as La Vestale, Les Deux Journées, and Joseph was no trivial one. Today’s rulers are Flotow and Offenbach.”
Speaking of conductors and orchestras, he says: “For an intelligent orchestra player who feels and knows everything it must be terrible to have the time beaten for him by a stupid conductor, as all of them are nowadays. And what care is taken nowadays to ensure that people without fire are engaged everywhere! When a young foreigner such as our Macedonian friend comes to Germany in search of culture, all he encounters is spiteful mediocrity.”