Monday, August 2:
Heavy rain, housework. Wrote to Claire to ask her to write belatedly to Hans. Suspicion that Hans might have received news of Siegfried's birth in a cruel manner and is offering me divorce as a sort of punishment. R. did not wish to show me Dr. Hallwachs's letter. I beg him never to try to spare me things, since the things I find hard to accept all lie elsewhere than in so-called vexations. I can bear abuse and ignominy and such things more easily in areas where the heart is not involved. Hans promises not to try to take advantage of his rights.
In the morning with the children, inking in the Siegfried score. Afternoon with R.; played the Faust Overture and two Haydn symphonies, during which we remarked that in matters of form Haydn is a greater master than Mozart. Arrival of the original score of the first act of Tristan.
In the evening conversation about my father's works; R., very concerned about the turn his intellect has taken, speaks with preference of the Faust Symphony and even indeed of Mazeppa for its grand sweep, deplores the tiresome apotheosis fad and the use of the triangle, gong strokes, rattling chains in Tasso, etc. His church music, he says, degenerates into a very childish juggling of certain intervals. Sorrow that he never lived in really close communion with him. Regret over the influence of Princess W[ittgenstein], who like a savage could only appreciate the most vulgar of effects, musical chocs. Concerning Die heilige Elisabeth, Nietzsche yesterday remarked to me that it smelled more of incense than of roses.
Today R. said that now, at the age of fifty, one knew what love was; everything prior to it had been mere amours. During the night I read Tristan und Isolde, and R., who knew I had taken the book upstairs with me, played some passages from it below as I read it in bed.
Catulle Mendès sends a Swedenborgian poem of his; unfortunately it makes impossible reading.