Tuesday, April 6:
R. finishes his letter to the King and complains of the obtuseness of his fellow citizens. It looks, he says, as if he will have to give concerts in order to provide the necessary guesthouses as well! Fine weather; I pack for the two eldest girls, and R. walks to the theater and makes another painful discovery there: they have built the orchestra pit too small!
R. sees me packing and is very affected. “The rest is silence”; the quotation brings him to Shakespeare. It seems like deliberate irony in view of the long speech which Hamlet makes in Saxo Grammaticus.
In the evening a singer who delivers Agathe’s aria from Der Freischütz with all the usual bad habits of singers and conductors; R. says he could put the whole modern musical world to shame with this single aria, in which the important parts are always sung as if they meant nothing and the unimportant parts with great pathos! I am packing until well into the night.