Thursday, March 7:
R. works; lunch with our friend. All the reports she brings us of the outside world contain little to give us pleasure: 'brutality and servility,' socialist machinations (she has given me Lassalle's Une Page d'amour to read!), etc.
R. continues to read Lichtenberg, with ever-increasing enjoyment. Of certain passages he said yesterday, laughing, 'That could have been taken from my collected writings.'
In the evening conversation with our friend, then some music, the Prelude to Act III of Die Meistersinger: 'At that time I was a lonely man,' says R. 'I no longer need such consolation.' Memories of the performance of Die Meistersinger in Munich: 'The loveliest experience of my artistic life, it was virtually perfect.' Then R. plays the C-sharp Minor Prelude from Bach's 48 Preludes and Fugues. An indescribable impression, it echoes within us like the quiet lament of a sphinx, or vanishing gods, or Nature before the creation of mankind!
R. says he has been composing it himself ever since his childhood, but he is not sure whether he plays it properly. The sonata, he says, brought shallowness to this original form of prelude and fugue; it was Philipp Emanuel Bach who introduced this Italianate style, and all instrumental music since then has sounded like a concert, a court concert, when compared with this revelation. And just think what Bach himself looked like, with his half-blind, anxious eyes, like Beethoven; musicians are like that, curious creatures! Before that R. played various Italian themes, from Bellini's I Capuleti e i Montecchi, La Straniera, and Norma, and said: 'For all the poverty of invention, there is real passion and feeling there, and the right singer has only to get up and sing it for it to win all hearts. I have learned things from them which Messrs. Brahms & Co. have never learned, and they can be seen in my melodies.' After playing the C-sharp Minor Prelude, he observes, with reference to the Italian melodies whose peculiar passion we have just acknowledged, 'That is pour le monde, but this (the Prelude) is the world itself.'
Second issue of the Bayreuther Blätter, very good. Mimi has given me an essay by Renan, 'La Poésie des races celtiques', which is another curious example of the superficial, poetically sentimental way in which even the most significant Frenchmen treat scientific subjects; what most clearly shines forth is his ignorance of the German character, but it is readable and entertaining, as long as one is aware of what is incorrect in it.