Friday, March 29:
R. had a somewhat troubled night. At least, troubled dreams in the early morning: that friend W. had wanted to assault me, because I had told R. that the former was attempting to force him out of the Bayreuther Blätter, and R. challenged him on it!
Conversation about Schopenhauer and the splendors of Indian wisdom, as reflected in the saying about badness and mediocrity. “Now we haven’t even got mediocrity, under which I should put Schumann, Hölderlin; so we have to promote badness to that position, like assigning the King of Württemberg to the second class of violinists.” Yesterday R. expressed his astonishment that, although he was so famous, people still tended to read what was written about him, rather than what he himself wrote; this was true even of the Jewish pamphlet. “I have been sitting at the piano for two hours,” he tells me; he is somewhat tired.
Arrival of the 6,000 marks from Schwerin; we take them to the banker Gross, who receives us with the words “My joys know no ending,” meaning the constant flow of subscriptions to the Society of Patrons. Walking in our garden, we catch sight of the first crocuses, a touching moment. As we return home through the palace gardens, he says: “It does not say much for Schopenhauer that he did not pay more attention to my Ring des Nibelungen. I know no other work in which the breaking of a will, and what a will, which delighted in the creation of a world, is shown as being accomplished through the individual strength of a proud nature without the intervention of a higher grace, as it is in Wotan. Almost obliterated by the separation from Brünnhilde, this will rears up once again, bursts into flame in the meeting with Siegfried, flickers in the dispatching of Waltraute, until, we see it entirely extinguished at the end in Valhalla.”
At supper he returns to this and says: “I am convinced Sch. would have been annoyed that I discovered this before I knew about his philosophy, I, a political refugee, the indefensibility of whose theories had been proved by his disciple Kossak on the basis of his philosophy, since my music is supposed to have no melody. But it was not very nice. It’s the way Goethe treated Kleist, whom he should have acclaimed, as Schumann acclaimed Brahms, but that only seems to happen among donkeys.” We finish the biography. R. then plays something from the Overture to Die Feen, which has just arrived in piano arrangement.
We laugh at Sch.’s mistaken beliefs, for instance, that De Sanctis was his disciple. “One should never yield to such mistaken beliefs,” R. says, “and then one can be truly happy.” I tell R. that I believe him to be the only person who has really absorbed Sch.’s philosophy into his thinking. “Most people,” he says, “want to do something with philosophy, as with religion, even redeem themselves; I can’t become saintly all at once, but at least a bit more just.”