Sunday, March 31:
R. was very languid in the morning, and I, God knows why, completely worn out; R. reproaches me for not looking after myself enough, for working too much with the children, he says I should copy him. I: “Oh, with you it is completely different, you are creating something.” He: “Well, I’m not such a pretty creation myself, that is your doing.”
How soon, however, am I completely recovered; R. fetches me for lunch and says, “Do you know how Kundry calls to Parsifal?” He sings me the phrase, so piercingly tender, with which she names him: “It is the first time his name is spoken, and thus his mother had called him! Only music can do that.” “And only your music,” I add. At lunch he tells us stories from the Oberfränkische Zeitung supplement: “How I love people who fight against the will!” Telegram from Hamburg.
R. goes for a walk; a stone breaker joins him: “You are without your wife today, yesterday she was with you.” He talks about his work. R. complains of the feelings of oppression besetting him. In the evening R. sings a theme from a Mozart quartet which he finds uniquely graceful and beautiful, but unfortunately it soon gives way to banality: “That is what we owe to Beethoven, that he did away with the bridging passages, in him everything is part of the melody.” He sings us Beethoven’s splendid songs to words by Gellert; the first in particular moves me to tears. “They were among the decisive impressions of my youth,” R. says.
He bemoans the fact that Weber always felt obliged to introduce a hunters’ chorus, an aria of expectant waiting. At lunch he sings something from Tristan, and I tell him it had been in my mind in the morning. “Things went badly for me with this,” he says, “my first Italian opera for an audience of mulattoes; my model was Romeo and Juliet - nothing but duets!” In the evening he starts chiding me again and says, “You would like to use yourself all up, so that nothing is left.” I, laughing: “Well, yes, that’s true.” “Then you’d see what a fine mess I should become.” Just before going off to bed he remembers the little dog he bought in Meudon for 3 francs; he did not know what to call it, told M. Jadin it raised no associations in his mind. “Call it 3 francs,” said his landlord.