Sunday, March 17:
R. had a tolerable night, though with one frightening dream about me: “Minna no longer suffices when the aim is to give me a fright - they need you for that,” he says with a laugh. He works and reaches “Verfluchtes Weib, was fragst du dies.” Friend Heckel is not able to accept the terms but would like very much to have Die Walküre. R. writes to him saying he would gladly give him personally the whole of the Sang for nothing, but he would not make the Mannheim theater a present of a single cent.
At lunch R. laughs over their imagining they could cast Die Walküre properly. “I ought to advise them to do Tristan und Isolde, for at least they’ve got a good flute player.” R. goes out and then works again until suppertime. We finish Waverley; R. thinks the court scene splendid; it is fine of Walter Scott to sacrifice the people whose exaltation does have a tinge of corruption in it.
Talking of various themes which have occurred to him, R. says, “It’s all just playing around, not the right thing at all.” Of the experience with H[eckel] R. says, “One mustn’t get involved with people without education - they don’t understand what one is saying.”
Baron Bradwardine is R.’s favorite, I love such people. The whole thing is splendid, a vanishing era, a quite different one emerging. If only we had something like that, a similar picture of the Diadochi!
I tell R. how much I enjoy reading Wolfdietrich to the girls, he agrees with me and praises Simrock’s work very highly, saying he took from the ancient language everything that was necessary and understandable. “How, after such works, can something like The Trumpeter of Säckingen become popular in such a sloppy version?” The German language, he says, is now the only one which, as J. Grimm says, can be studied physiologically, not just in order to speak it or to read the classical writers (in contrast to French, English, and Italian).