Monday, April 29:
R. had a good night and was not wearied by our long walk.
We find it hard not to speak now and again about friend N.’s sad book, although both of us can only surmise its contents from a few passages rather than really know it. R. is reading Renan’s The Apostles and is pleased with the remark that the Gospel According to Saint Matthew was the first book to be written in a popular style. At breakfast he says that, if he were to present anything here after Parsifal, it would be Tristan and Die Meistersinger, but he doubts whether he could find a singer for Tristan; he says he wants to make some alterations in the third act, also in the ending: “I don’t know what devil it was that drove me to produce such stuff - it was the music, which came welling like that out of the subject.”
How little words contributed to the drama, he told us recently, he saw from the fact that in London he had understood hardly any of Jefferson’s words but had been able to follow everything, had not been bored for an instant. “It’s characters one wants, not speeches.” I study the Flower Maidens’ scene, this splendid, incomparable scene, about which R. said to me, “Yes, I am rather proud of it.” In the afternoon a rehearsal with the children while R. is resting, then I drive with R. to the Waldhütte: lovely hours!
Pressed between this page and the next are a few dried stalks of forget-me-not.
R. remarks that the absence of a large river is responsible for our countryside here being so remote, so like Paradise. Where there is a large river there is also activity; here it is idyllic. The cuckoo greets us as we turn into the woods; he calls 24 times in a row; we listen blissfully. The sky is not as clear as yesterday, but a fine day nevertheless. In the evening Ivanhoe; unfortunately we become only too conscious of certain weaknesses in this beautiful work, as, for instance, the long stretches of dialogue, Rebecca and Ivanhoe’s arguing about chivalrous honor even in the most terrible situations, and the short, but still too long, conversation when the Templar fetches Rebecca. After our friends have gone, R. recalls our old and difficult times in Munich: “How did I manage to put up with it?”