Friday, April 5:
R. had a good night. He complained yesterday of the oppressive effect of the constantly gray skies; we resolve to spend three months each year, from January to the middle of April, in Florence: “I shall then write a symphony a year.” As he embraces me before leaving me after breakfast, he says, “You are the most beautiful of all.”
Around lunchtime he calls me and plays me “Komm, holder Knabe” from his sketches, that most enchanting of scenes. Yesterday he said, “In the first act I was very sparing of sensuous intervals, but now I am going back to my old paintpot.”
A Deutsche Revue (the title alone makes him laugh!) asks him for his recollections, and he tells friend F[eustel] to reply saying he has no recollections, except of bad newspaper articles. We decide not to go out; the skies are still gray. Yesterday he said during our walk, “Why do the birds sing so much? They don’t worry about how the heavens look, they just sing as children laugh, without cause!”
At the end of Herr Kastner’s catalogue, “Laborious work, unlaboriously done,” is printed an article by R. on the ballet Gräfin Egmont. R. is not pleased, since he did not wish to acknowledge the article, which was a sort of concession to prevailing circumstances. R. went out after all. In the evening he says gaily that Herr v. Hülsen is giving as few performances of his works as possible, being too stupid, like an ox one can take to a certain point, but then it gets angry and refuses to go farther. We think of Javert in Hugo’s Les Misérables, and I say to R., “Hülsen may yet go mad over the Ring and throw himself into the water.”
Read Scott’s Ivanhoe. Some schoolteachers from Dillingen in Swabia have joined the Society of Patrons. R. complains of not having played his maidens well enough to me! . . .