Monday, September 20:
Still Fidi-night and Fidi-morning. Dreamed that Hans had died, great melancholy.
Yesterday R. told me a delightful dream he had had: he was walking with me across a bridge and advised me to go slowly, but I was careless and fell into the water, and yet I only got wet, which made R. say to himself, I shall always take shoes and stockings with me. Then he suddenly heard the Siegfried theme, slightly varied, on a child’s trumpet, and he was pleased that I had taught it to Siegfried. Then he woke up, and it was the soft cooing of the baby at the first crowing of Giolnir, that is what we call our tiny cock, which had brought it all about.
The botanist this morning; I gave him a copy of Goethe’s Dichtung und Wahrheit along with his fee.
In the A.A.Z. two very ridiculous statements by Baron Perfall and Herr Julius Grosse, author of that recent choice article.
In the afternoon visit from Herbeck, the conductor, concerning Die Meistersinger, which is shortly to be performed in Vienna. He asks R. whether something was cut in his reply to the A.A.Z., for he could not otherwise understand the newspaper’s preliminary remark about it. R. tells him that two acts of malice had here canceled each other out: when the editors saw the calmness of his reply, they had hoped for an order not to print the article; those in the Cabinet, on the other hand, had been glad that R. had allowed himself to be provoked, and had ordered it to be printed. In such ways is justice sometimes furthered.
The extent to which people are interested in the Rheingold affair is demonstrated by the fact that the Luzerner publishes two articles about it: the first, to which the paper gives editorial support, is disgraceful, the second tolerable.
Wrote to Countess Krockow.