Friday, July 24:
While I was attending to various things outside, R. had to deal with some domestic difficulties, and that brings us, after lunch, to talk about all sorts of things concerning the world and the artist, his absent-mindedness with regard to the realities of life.
In this connection he tells me how once, on an outing with Dr. Wille and Herwegh to [place name left blank], he became so tired that he asked the two men to leave him at a certain point and to go on without him. Dr. Wille, believing that it was simply idleness, had then given him a shove in the back and told him to get moving; R.’s rage had vented itself in a vulgar expletive, and during this scene the whole of Loge’s address to the Rhinemaidens (words and music), which he had not originally had in mind, came to him.
“The way it just flies into one’s mind. Impossible to say how it happens! When I sit down at the piano, it is just to refresh my memory; nothing new comes to me there, I am just trying to find the things which occurred to me now and then during the most exasperating situations. This used to upset Minna, my first wife, the way I would keep calm during the terrible scenes she was making, because something had occurred to me for Tristan or Die Walküre!”
He feels that, because in anger a person’s powers are stretched, his true nature is also goaded into activity in spite of all the incongruities; only for working out one’s ideas are tranquillity and a certain bodily well-being necessary. Artistic work demands these things, but inspiration laughs at all difficulties as well as all comfort.
He reminds me that he had not been satisfied with the quintet in Die Meistersinger and I, coming in while he was composing, had begged him to retain it. His dissatisfaction had been due to his feeling that it had been as it was. Composition is a search for things which come into one’s mind God knows how, where, or when.
In the evening Herr Alexis sings Günther and Holländer. R. dreamed of seeing me in a white muslin dress, but it was rather threadbare, particularly the pink sash. “My God,” I thought to myself, “she is doing all this just as a favor to me.”