Wednesday, March 13:
R. had a good night and goes to his work; he tells me he is satisfied with what he has done, although, at the time he wrote it, he had not been fully satisfied. The 'Grail' returns, Amfortas is healed. I go to the theater with the children. R. goes out in the garden for a while to walk.
In the evening our friend Count Du Moulin, announcing 27 members, our little Society is growing. 'It is as impossible to write music without melody,' R. says in the course of the conversation, 'as to speak without thoughts: melody is musical thought.' Many amusing examples of the poor and threadbare melodies in Meyerbeer, strung together from bar to bar with an oom-pah-pah accompaniment. As a contrast R. sings Don Ottavio's aria and says, 'There, that is melody, there one is confronted with a real person.' R. also spoke in recent days with the greatest admiration of Haydn's Seven Last Words, saying it was deeply moving.
In the evening R. says to me: 'Everybody is astonished that I look so well; that after things and experiences that would have killed anyone else I am now writing a new work. Where do I find the strength, when after Tristan nobody thought I would ever write another note? From the fact that I am borne along on your love!'
Letter from the King's secretary, saying they intend to put the matter in order. Contract from Brunswick. Friend Heckel is now also asking for the Ring. In the evening we went through the Prelude to Parsifal; friend Seidl played it, and R. had to spend much time talking about the tempo, which S. took too slowly, or, rather, incorrectly. R. says that tempo cannot be written down, every piece has its own way of being played; of course there are pieces, he says, in which the tempo must be taken with tremendous sharpness and precision, but one must know which they are, and that must be learned from the composer. That is why he had wanted to found a school, 'where I should have vexed myself to death every day,' he added. Herr S. then plays the entrance of the knights into the Temple of the Grail, and R. is pleased when our good Count joins in to play the upper voice. 'That's what I like,' he says, 'people who can do things.'
We recall that in Tribschen I had always taken over Loge's 'tingling delight' when R. was playing 'Siegfried's Journey to the Rhine.' Talking about this violin figuration, R. speaks of the violin figuration he wrote in Paris for Tannhäuser's staggering exit, and how Gasperini called it un beau désordre.