Thursday, March 21:
R. had a tolerable night, the first part at any rate very peaceful; he complains about the sunless skies, it really is always gray outside. At breakfast he recalls that friend Seidl asked him about the tempo of the Adagio in the Pastoral: “Adagio! They don’t know the difference between andante and adagio, they drag movements which ought to flow and ruin them that way. What on earth do they learn in Leipzig, Vienna, and all the other places where Seidl was?” Spanish biography, a Dutch account of R.’s life!
At lunch R. says that “Mirregni” is now in order. “Mirregni” is the song Loldi composed two years ago in honor of the dog Marke; yesterday I said to R., when he was humming to himself something from the 2nd act, that he was singing “Mirregni”; he laughed, and the name stuck. “Incidentally, I shall compose your ‘Mirregni’ once again, Loldi, particularly with that nice echo.”
Newspapers from Australia, which gives R. a chance to talk about the British: “A curious people, our present-day Vikings, and their faces - so limited, yet so assured, so resourceful and prudent.”
Talking about Parsifal’s arrival in the garden, he says: “Ah, yes, music! What could ever replace it? When he appears up there and his theme is heard - in spoken drama this pause would be impossible. The eloquent pause - that is the province of music.” Talking about Lichtenberg, he says he finds it difficult on the whole to read such isolated thoughts strung together, the time comes when he no longer really knows what he is reading; one needs a context, order, a plan, a drama. “In the end I watch them as if they were fleas, waiting for one of them to bite.” In reading them one just looks for the witticism. Even Ottilie’s diary in Elective Affinities: “I was always glad to reach the end of it.”
R. goes to see the W.’s and afterward tells me that a disgruntled man, won over again by What Is German?, has joined the Society of Patrons.
After his walk R. works, but first he answers friend Heckel’s letter, dispelling his curious delusion that he, R., had looked upon his appointment as a victory for the cause. How few friends have any real idea of what goes on in R.’s mind!
Good letter from Feustel, R. says, “Let’s wait and see.” In the evening with friend W., went through Herr Porges’s article. R. finds the beginning (religion as a link between art and public) not bad, but what follows is such that R. decides to write to the author asking him to shorten his opus. I come to realize during the reading that these people have no separate inner life of their own, no real experience of good and evil, which is why everything they say is shallow and indefinite; people who lead an inner life and are aware of it (never mind how important or petty the outward circumstances) must affirm Schopenhauer’s philosophy.
R. also has much to say about language. [A sentence about the meaning of certain German words omitted.] He laughs at the term “reformer” being applied to him: “I have reformed nothing. The expression fits Luther, but I have just cultivated seeds already there.” In our final colloquy in the evening all our outside experiences are forgotten, we speak only of ourselves or of things; today, for example, of what used to be looked upon as a necessity - that every finale “should be a sort of frenzy, a drunken hotchpotch of suffering and joy; I provided my share of that in Rienzi.” “Die Meistersinger,” I say, “is also unique in this respect - the conclusion of the first act, for example.”