Wednesday, October 27:
R. reminds me that during the reading of Pandora yesterday, Epimetheus’s account of her disappearance, I had wept; he finds much of the poem lovely, but detects in it a striving toward forms. After lunch R. talks about Lessing’s saying that the search for truth is better than the truth itself: “Yes, if there were nothing better to be had than what we nowadays understand by truth!”
In the evening Beethoven’s A major Quartet without overmuch enjoyment; R. had always praised the scherzo as being a dance of Dutch peasants, but it turns out that he had completely recomposed it in his memory. In reality it is much less robust, much more sentimental than he had imagined. The E minor makes us happy, particularly the minuet, which R. declares to be one of the loveliest ever to have been written! The first part of this minuet seems to me like the fluttering of two butterflies yearning for the light, an interplay of pain, joy, and agitation, but what can possibly be said about music?
R. advises our young musicians to pay attention to the difference between tempo di minuetto and minuetto; the first is slower, the second, through Haydn’s influence, more like a slow country waltz. R. goes through some Haydn quartets, finds them splendid.