Tuesday, March 19:
“I had a quite convenable night,” R. replies in the style of Frederick the Great (echoes of yesterday’s reading) when I ask him.
I mention the beauty and splendor of the Idyll. R. says: “I should like to write many more things like that. No one feels gratitude for the daemonic things: did anyone take notice of Hill’s Alberich?” Yesterday he said he always thought of Hill in connection with Klingsor.
Talking about the orchestra for the Idyll and his pleasure in writing things of this kind, R. moves on to quartets and says: “It is a peculiar thing about quartets: the four instruments have at times to assume a role similar to a piano, stepping in for others; the cello, having just played low notes, must start singing right up high, and that takes away its beautiful repose and evenness, it sounds in some way hurried, uncertain, and the themes don’t divide and separate. I should very much like to score the first movement of Beethoven’s E-flat Major Quartet, for instance, for an orchestra more or less the same as that for the Idyll. You would see how the themes would stand out, how something played on the horns would become clearer, whereas even in the best performance so much is lost, things are not separated out.”
Talked again about Schopenhauer, how fortunate it was that he learned Latin and Greek so late in life, but how remarkable that he then mastered them so completely.
After embracing me, R. goes off to his work singing; bells are ringing, I hear my children laughing, I enjoy then one of those moments of bliss in which the poor heart struggles for expression and finds it solely in tears!
Lunch alone with R., he eats something cold, he has done a lot of work downstairs, but he looks well and is cheerful. “You are all things,” he says to me when I show my pleasure, “you are the whole of Wahnfried, and I am your Wahnfritz.”
Curious telegram from friend Heckel... Friend Gross comes in the afternoon and unfortunately mentions the Munich contract; I beg R. just to get on with his work, and he then sends the card [not deciphered] in to me; I answer it at once with a “yes” and ask Gross to instruct his father-in-law accordingly. Splendid letter from my father about the Idyll, once again; inimitable quotation from Faust. “What an artist he is!” says R., deeply touched. And the quotation is indeed perfect in all particulars.
R. very upset by the little - the very little - he has heard about the contract. Friend Feustel arrives with extremely unpleasant accounts of the King’s position; it is being said that a trustee will have to be appointed to control his affairs, but nobody dares take the responsibility for such an act. Feustel and the mayor are to go to Munich tomorrow.
In the evening a gathering here in honor of Feustel.
R. brought me the first pencil sketches of the 2nd act.
R. told me recently that he owes the “yes” in Parsifal and Kundry’s dialogue (Act I) to the children’s conversations here - that importantly eager “yes”!
After the gathering R. comes up to me, rather worn out. Everything that disturbs his routine disagrees with him. “I am sorry for my poor maidens, whom I must now make sing,” he says as he is getting into bed. “I feel as if I were drunk,” he said at supper, “and it is only in a state of drunkenness that one can look upon this world; to look at it straight is impossible.” “Did Fidi bring you the kiss I gave him for you? He was quite astounded by its violence. ‘Silly boy,’ I told him, ‘that’s for Mama.’ ” (Fidi had taken him my “yes” to his decision.) “I shall sing nothing now except the Idyll.”