Sunday, March 29:
To church with the two elder children; R. works. C-sharp Minor Quartet. R.’s reminiscences of his first musical experiences, Magdeburg, etc. “By the time of Zurich I had already completed a lifelong appointment.”
Asked by the Macedonian who the character R. was in his short story A Pilgrimage to Beethoven, Richard says, “A certain Reichard, who really did tell me some of the things in it, in the way that such things are always based on fact; but I went on to weave personal experiences into it.”
The Macedonian tells us that when he asked Herr Rheinberger about it, the latter had made a dismissive gesture and observed that Wagner had put his own ideas into Beethoven’s mouth in order to present himself as an equal!