Tuesday, September 25:
R. feels he would find it easier to reach an understanding with a Prussian lieutenant than with the most educated Frenchman - the language is too great a gulf.
He works and in the afternoon goes to view the site for the school.
In the evening I show him my newly arranged manuscript folders, and afterward he reads me, with much amusement, Voltaire's article on Aristotle in the Dictionnaire philosophique. The boldness of its flights of imagination leads us to Beethoven, and R. says that, were he to try to visualize Beethoven "in all his starry glory," he would surely think of the second movement of Opus 111 (Adagio with variations); he knows nothing more ecstatic, he says, yet at the same time it is never sentimental. The Larghetto of Opus 106 he finds too long and somewhat academic; it grieves me to observe that what one of the greatest does is not always acceptable to another of the greatest, even in his most mature works.