Saturday, May 15:
Timetable for the little ones; letter from the head mistress about Boni and Lusch. I am particularly worried about her opinion of the latter; exhortations to the children! Very nice letter from O. Bach and a very fine one from friend Nietzsche about Götterdämmerung. R. said to me, “That must make you glad, to know that I created such a work under your protection.” I replied that he would have gone on creating anyway, even without me. “Yes, but I should never have written that, it was you who coaxed those sounds out of me.” He is thinking a lot about Parsifal, intends to guide his reading in that direction. May God bless him! In the evening tea in the garden, a registered letter from Brunswick. R. at once had a premonition, and, true enough, Schroetter, the newly won Siegfried, now declines the part. I write asking him whether he really means this! With the customary calm he always shows when things go wrong, R. says, “And I thought I now only had the accommodation problem to worry about!” We occupy ourselves with Beethoven’s sketches for the 9th Symphony, edited by Nottebohm. Very strange how trivial, almost how commonplace, the most significant themes when first written down; R. says it is like that with him, what he first writes down he can hardly ever use just in that way: it is a sort of indication that one has something in mind, quite different, which one then finds again. R. goes out with the children; when the small dogs showed interest in the bitch Brange, Fidi said calmly, “That is disgusting.” On his treatment of medicinal waters, breakfast in the garden; modest meal with young Brandt, the two Lalas brothers, and Herr Zimmer. Herr Rubinstein, back from Brunswick, confirms the news about Schroetter, adding that the director was offended because R. did not write to him.