Monday, April 1:
R. had a good night, except that his wife Minna again made a nuisance of herself: “But I have learned to be suitably rude now.” He performs all kinds of April Fools’ jokes with the children at lunch, much to his amusement. Various house and garden problems for me!
R. goes for a walk but complains of the weather, which is very windy; the forecasts for April are bad! A construction worker greets him: “Good day, master.” In the afternoon R. finishes his letter to the King, in which he talks of the talented theater manager His Excellency Baron Perfall and of his fellow knight Brahms!
In the evening he goes through Spontini’s Olimpie Overture with Herr Seidl, who does not know it: “Splendid stuff,” says R., “I can actually see the Diadochi filing in. It stands somewhere between Gluck and Rossini, quite remarkable - it has an entirely Gluckian structure and a passion for cadences such as no one showed before Rossini, except Cherubini. But it has character; one is aware of a proud fellow who will stand no nonsense, wears all his medals on his chest. One can see what a difference self-assurance makes, how unmistakably dramatic it all is when one compares it with Brahms, for instance.”
Of Cherubini’s works he praises the Rodoiska Overture and in Medea the entrance of the dominant, which he felt in his youth to be like the sun coming out. A discourse on the un-German nature of rhyme and its impracticability in music produces from him a remark about the trochees in The Trumpeter of Säckingen: “That is just a dirty joke.” Regarding the Diadochi he says: “Alexander was after all too great for epic poetry, his deeds during those ten years too tremendous. I once sketched out a drama called Alex., the first act was the murder of Clitus, the second the decision to withdraw from Asia, the third his death; writers nowadays usually select the burning of Persepolis, Thais with the torch - the lyrical elements! I also sketched the third act of an Achilles and a Barbarossa” (to this he linked his remarks about verse).
He then, in his wonderful way, reads us the first canto of the Iliad, with overpowering effect. “There one can start thinking again about the author problem,” he says. He finds Voss’s translation very good but regrets that in his use of German he had not yet progressed beyond Lessing: words like “Palast” [“palace”], etc., disturb him. He remarks on the fact that the sense of a line is often transferred to another, which shows the illusory nature of verse. After that, several things from Bach’s 48 Preludes and Fugues, and R. cannot praise highly enough the remarkable singing quality of the figurations.
After our friends have gone R. and I once more talk about the beauties of the first canto of the Iliad. I tell him I was particularly struck by the way Homer, dealing with the human quality in a woman’s needs, has made the insult to her honor a particularly sensitive point, and I was reminded of Loge’s conclusion that nobody is prepared to sacrifice love.