Thursday, February 28:
R. again had a bad night, but, as he tells me, realizes the Teufelsbraut (“the devil’s bride”). While he is taking his rest, I practice the Idyll with indescribable emotion; he comes in quietly and listens. When I notice his presence, he tells me that he wrote down the first theme in Starnberg, during my visit there. “Oh, yes, we know where it all started.”
From the garden, while he is wandering around, he calls out to me that these are the loveliest days of our lives. He then calls me out to listen to a little bird in a bush singing, the Idyll! The little bird is singing shyly still but very touchingly.
Returning from his walk, R. tells me he would like to show me a passage in Lichtenberg in which he talks of man and wife and says how helpful it is for a husband when he can complain to his fellow, who can be a man’s friend. R. reads Schemann’s preface to his anthology of his [Wagner’s] writings about the great masters of music and regrets the author’s inability to understand why he does not respect Schumann, in whose music he can discern little, whom he knowingly regards as a very fragile talent; “produce a theme, it is a Beethovenian one: How there can be Schumann devotees I cannot imagine.”
Delight in Parsifal: Amfortas’s Lament and the songs in the Temple of the Grail. Like the Grail itself R.’s face lights up as he sings, while the sounds penetrate to my heart, wonderfully uplifting!