Wednesday, June 5:
R. had a good night. He thinks of his good friend Pusinelli and how pleased he would have been with Parsifal. Memories of all our other good old friends, Standhartner, Mathilde Maier, A. Frommann, M. Meysenbug, Sulzer. Then he cries: "Shall I fetch the midwife? Do you want to bring down your blankets?"
R. works. He says he has found a transition, and at coffeetime he jumps up and plays this deeply moving passage. "It leads into the vision of Amfortas, abbreviated: everything of course rushes headlong through Parsifal's memory." At lunch we feel a desire for news of the Emperor, but there is nothing new. The sight of Siegfried's handsome, cheerful, good face, which gives his father such pleasure, starts a detailed discussion about the boy's education; I remark that, if I were well off, I should try to engage Glasenapp to carry out this task, along with Wolzogen. "Yes," says R., "it would have to be somebody with a great love for me who, for the sake of this love, would feel the urge to turn the nice boy into a respectable man."
"Now Cologne has accepted my conditions, so we may still become rich! It is very curious, it must be that other things don't draw. People will think I've given all the other composers some magic potion in order to keep them from producing anything worth having." He goes for a short walk, and after reading Plutarch's life of Pericles with the older children upstairs, I go down to him. He is sitting at the Italian table and reading the article on God in Voltaire's Dictionnaire philosophique; the very first sentence reminds him of Schopenhauer, but then he says one can see in what poor shape philosophy was before the arrival of Kant.
First, however, as I entered, he greets me with the words "I have had a brain wave, a composing whim," and, after speaking of V., he gets up and plays me a theme, which he intends to give to Kundry. "You can see, of course, how much can be developed from it." I tell him I am downright grateful that Kundry is to be given some accents of this kind, for so far only the melancholy tenderness of Herzeleide and the awesomeness of amorous desire have shown through. "Yes," says R., "one has to be very careful here, the emotional element must always be kept terribly noble. All the same," he adds jokingly, "for the sake of the house, for Fidi's birthday, one can perhaps make a slight concession."
At supper he tells us that he also read the article on Cromwell in V. with much enjoyment, and indeed he laughed aloud over the description of the twice-won battle (Moses, Gideon, Joshua). Friend Wolzogen's pamphlet on language pleases him greatly. "That's the way to sing your own praises!" he remarks with a laugh. "But I can say in my own defense that it is other people's thoughts which please me, not their praise."
Continued reading Schopenhauer; but the reading does not give us undiluted pleasure, however unique these letters; when we are alone, R. says to me: "This man might almost be called scurrilous. I wonder whether among the Greeks people did not show up better, Sophocles, for example? The only ones who look truly great in the face of the world are the saints!" Friend Feustel has discovered a lawyer in Dresden who will now look after R.'s rights in connection with the Court theatre.