Monday, May 27:
R. had a good night and is in good spirits. Nice letter from the King, regretting that R. should have felt obliged, as it were, to write to him on the 22nd through his messenger. (The King deplores the consequences of 1869-1870!) R. replies at once, sending him the scenario of the May Festival, then does some work. “I am so well that I feel like composing,” he says.
At lunch we decide against our projected outing, but over coffee R. looks at the sky and resolves on it again; christening of the carriage with the children, “Uncle” Seidl, and both of us; to the Waldhütte. Splendid mood of gaiety, the new carriage (a birthday gift) fills R. with utter delight, he takes pleasure in us, the children, the countryside, the people (a man offers the children beer from his mug), the woods. Rest on a rock, listening to the cuckoo, the liveliest and most cheerful of spirits, even my new English hat, bought to celebrate R.’s birthday, pleases him: “You look like a Roman patrician’s lady from the first centuries who has just embraced Christianity but still retains her old habits.”
The children recite their May Festival in the carriage. “Keep that fast in your memory,” R. exclaims to them, “and may life never strip this act of dedication from you. They all showed that they came from your womb,” he adds, turning to me, “and are different from others. All of them are a part of our happiness.” Looking at Fidi, he says, “I should be fifteen years younger.”
In the evening we read the enclosures from our incomparable friend Glasenapp; the article Bellini pleases even R. himself, and he finds the letter from Uncle Adolph very interesting. Of his article on German opera he says, “That was pretty bold: I knew nothing of Gluck, and Euryanthe I knew only from one bad performance.” Even in his most excessive assertions I can always recognize the great feeling for truth, the fight against all hypocrisy, the receptive feeling and sharp eye for dramatic significance, in whatever form it may show itself, and the fight against the undramatic, however lovely it might otherwise be. We exclaim with a laugh. If only Schopenhauer had read this article about Bellini!” “Yes,” says R., “then he would have consigned Kossak to the scrap heap.”
As we are preparing for bed we go once more through the whole splendid day. “It’s a never-ending joy, this carriage,” says R., and “You are to blame for every day I remain alive.” Thus he brings this blissful day to a close. I forgot to note down that after the enclosures R. felt the need, as he put it, for someone really great, and he read to us the first act of Macbeth. “Beside that everything else is child’s play,” he says at the end, after we have once again been shattered by its power, which impresses one anew at each encounter. The way Macbeth, the simple, rough soldier, is at once totally consumed after seeing the apparition, nothing left of him but a single thought, the mutual distrust between him and Banquo; and then all the subsidiary factors, from the accounts of the witches to the significant feature of Duncan’s melancholy over his disappointed trust in Cawdor, expressed in the very moment in which he once again places his trust wrongly. The whole daemonic nature of life set before one’s eyes, naked, beyond all deception. “Everyone before him and after him is condemned to silence,” says R.