Friday, March 15:
R. had a better night; at breakfast he reads Tappert’s newspaper and finds all kinds of wrong things in it about Parsifal - even the “choruses” are praised! “Why can I never be left in peace to write a work in tranquillity for ourselves alone?”
He works and says he is more satisfied with what he has written in pencil than he had expected to be.
After lunch we go out together; he laughs over his “fresh and stormy gait” when with me; if he had been alone, he says, he would just have slouched along, hands behind his back. At the Wolzogens’ we find the contract from Schwerin, now in order, and so this unpleasant episode has also been resolved. On our return home R. writes to Herr v. Wolzogen senior and then does some more work in ink.
In the evening Waverley; the way the hero spends his lonely hours with his tenant reminds R. of Magdala: “Not regret at what had happened - didn’t feel that - but a feeling of having got myself into an absurd situation.” Our interest in the book grows ever greater: “You could have gone on reading it for hours and I should have listened.”
To conclude the evening he plays the melody from the Andante of his symphony, which I like very much; I tell him so. “Yes, that’s why I still believe I stole it from somewhere, though I knew very little at that time.”
At lunch he talked about Mozart, how he had earned nothing from Die Zauberflöte and how after J[oseph] II’s death no prince, no nobleman had bothered himself about Mozart, in spite of Figaro and all the other things. “Yes, our princes have always behaved splendidly! Mozart got 800 florins, and Jommelli 3,000 ducats!”
After lunch he says he is nervous about the great scene between Kundry and Parsifal; he has already done several things in this style, among others the Venus scene; Mozart only once did a scene such as the appearance of the Commendatore, and it is impossible to imagine that he would have done something similar a second time.
At supper we talk about the German language; he says Lessing did not really know it, Goethe had instinctively come much closer; Lessing wanted to set up a German language along the lines of French and English. He quotes Lichtenberg’s saying that one would be amazed how much there is in a word if only one thought about it. After Kunersdorf Frederick the Great wrote his resignation in German. Regret on my part that neither Goethe, Schiller, nor Kleist treated the Seven Years’ War in an epic manner. R. says they were already too much occupied with form and with foreign cultures. Recently R. said, “I almost wish Goethe had written nothing except Faust, so splendid is it!” (He had just quoted “From time to time I like to see the old boy,” etc.)