Monday, March 11:
R. remarks that I again have my 'melancholy, eager look,' which means that I am completely restored, and indeed the sweet habit of existence has me in its grip again! My work with the children, and nothing to disturb my close life with R.
He says to me, 'My maidens come rushing in with wild gesticulations, like children whose toys have been taken away; without anger.' Yesterday evening the children were reading aloud, and R. was captivated by the sight of Fidi's fair head as he listened: 'We must be glad that we lived to hear these children's voices,' he says. He recalled his own childhood, running around the Plauen estate, for him the embodiment of all romance; then he told us about a prank at his school, the Nikolai-Schule, when during the absence of the teacher he jumped on the podium to imitate him and, in opening the desk, broke it; given away by one of his fellow pupils, he started to lie, declaring that something had been passing by, all the pupils had gone to the window, and, since there was no other place from which he could see, he had jumped on the podium; after all kinds of dire threats (suspension from school, sending him home), the teachers were astounded by his vivid imagination, and they merely told him to be less eloquent in future!
I asked him yesterday whether he still needed the ink sketches of the first act of Parsifal: 'No, for I'm such a dolt that I can't transpose; I always go by the sound and never by abstract knowledge. Perhaps that has sometimes been my salvation, keeping me from writing down something just because, according to this or that relationship, it ought to be so.'
Today there are no sounds of music in the house; he feels he must write something for the Blätter: 'I am afraid of Porges, and my pencilings have just reached a point where I can break off. After these furious affairs it will be strange for me to have to compose nothing but pleasantnesses. Maybe I won't succeed.' Regarding his article, he says he enjoys writing it, but one always has too much to say. He tells me he has read in a newspaper that musicians who have heard some of Parsifal are saying it is even more beautiful than Lohengrin: 'Certainly it should be like Lohengrin but, with the help of a few swannishnesses, even more beautiful.'
I go out and, on my return, find R. in the garden; he had been with friend Seidl, looking at his symphony, and now has some doubts whether he will publish it. At lunch he sang something from Mozart's Don Giovanni, 'Vivan le femmine, viva il buon vino,' praising it and delighting in the charm of Mozart's genius: 'He died too young, had to work in too much of a rush. He would still have had a lot to show the world.' We wandered in the garden, finding much to delight us even now, a fat blackbird on the wall.
In the evening Waverley, fine scene with the Pretender. When mention is made of the Highlanders' crawling, R. says, 'I know all about that; it is not unlike the time I crossed the border in Riga.' He tells me, 'When one is reading, all these people seem like angels and spirits, not a trace of treachery in them.' We end this day in tender intimacy, with a full sense of our happiness, oblivious of the world, immersed in each other. Nothing can disturb us as long as we are together, not even the eternally gray skies! We talk of Italy, but only for a very short visit. I tell R. that he would miss his familiar contacts with the people, his only contact with the outside world; we should never escape our feelings of remoteness; but we intend, toward the end of winter (February, March), to spend some time in the South, or at any rate we talk about it, though not very urgently.