Monday, March 25:
R. had to get up during the night; I am alarmed because he is now drinking more cognac than he used to, and I tell him so.
Dear God, everything alarms me now; recently he complained of pressure above his left eye. But he works and is cheerful at lunch. I go out while it is snowing gently; when I return home, I find him playing the end of the Pastoral in the arrangement for piano duet. After that we go through the first scene of the second act again. “What would I have to be in order to be worthy of you?” “Quiet, quiet, you see we are still having inspirations, and you are the personification of all inspirations!”
In the evening he laughs at my remark that the difference between him and the other musicians of today is that they can work without inspiration, but he cannot: “And so I am a bungler compared with them.” Friend Heckel is in fact accepting Die Walküre; Herr Lesimple is also asking for it. In the evening Schop. provides, in the episode with the seamstress, a terrible, tragicomic picture of the life of a genius! ...
Over coffee R. tells me he is now writing words for his maidens, and it reminds him of the time when he wrote words for the ending of the second act of Die Meistersinger; also in Lohengrin’s finale he thought of the music first and then worked out a text for the chorus.