Friday, May 15:
Yesterday, on Ascension Day, the weather was fine and I could go out again, today it is wet once more. We talked at breakfast about Titus Andronicus and wondered whether it is genuine. Then about our particular favorites among the plays. R. says that when we last read King Lear the tremendous mounting tension, the coming and going, the scene division, the tremendous rapidity combined with an overall leisureliness had made quite a unique impression on him; otherwise Othello lay closest to his heart. For me Julius Caesar — I myself do not know why — remains, not my favorite (how can one speak in that way?), but at any rate quite peculiarly affecting.
Again letters from R. are being offered for sale, one of June 1858 to H. v. Bülow and the manuscript of Judaism in Music. R. dreamed of a performance of Tristan und Isolde in Dresden with a ballet and complete alteration of music and words, only isolated figurations being retained. The conductor was Herr Rietz, now gray-haired. “This is what people must do to my things to be able to perform them,” R. had said, but he then broke out in a fury.
I receive a letter from Herr Muchanoff, asking me in his wife’s name not to come to Warsaw; at the same time he tells me about her terrible agony. This oppresses me deeply, and, God knows how, I involuntarily allow the words “Who never ate with tears his bread” to escape my lips. With this I greatly irritate R. He tells me they are the expression of a beggar’s need and cannot be applied to spiritual sufferings. I say nothing, but later find the attached note on my writing desk. [R. W. wrote the above words by Goethe and opposite them: “Pleurons nous ou dinons nous? — Liszt” (“Are we weeping or dining?”)] The quotation from Liszt refers to an anecdote I told him — how once my mother kept weeping during a meal, whereupon my father asked her the above-mentioned question.
In the afternoon a telegram arrives from my friend, and I literally creep away to weep! In the evening we continue Titus Andronicus; through all the wretched crudenesses and crassnesses we do, however, recognize in isolated features the unmistakable hand of that divine being (the kneeling before the stones, Aaron’s paternal feelings, Titus’s madness, Lavinia’s searching in the book, etc.). “How remarkable it is that all this built up to Hamlet!” R. says.