Friday, August 7:
Breakfast with our friends in the summerhouse; conversation about Berlioz: according to R., his works could be played in open-air concerts, to which the whole cultured world would flock, but they are not easy to fit into concerts at which Mozart and Beethoven are played. The Germans rightly resist such an idea.
At the conclusion the song “Wir müssen scheiden” [“We have to part”] from Die Zauberflöte is sung, and R. draws our attention to the way in which, in this vocal trio - and indeed in the whole figure of Sarastro - Mozart for the first time sounded the note of a masculine dignity and cordiality which one might describe as German, which had been unknown before his time.
In his youth, he says, this parting trio struck him as the most blissful of all sounds, melancholy and consoling at the same time.
Visit from the most useless of Americans and a student from Dessau.
In the evening Götterdämmerung.