Sunday, June 9:
R. slept well; at breakfast he shows me in the Illustrirte Zeitung some etchings in the style of the old Dutch masters, which give him great pleasure: “You can search for a long time in literature before finding anything to equal that - Shakespeare, Faust, Dante, Don Quixote, and that’s all. How far below the painters of his time does Ariosto stand! He is a sort of Makart.” “Vegetation of figures and colors.”
An audience given by the Emperor to the Moroccan legation produces from R. the exclamation: “If they would only wear at least coats over that uniform! What do they look like, our princes?” He works and says at lunch that one passage caused him much trouble until he decided to transpose it - “Stupid fellow, not D minor, it must be C minor!” - and then everything was all right. He says he will be glad, when he stops for his cure, not to have to do it in a mood of dissatisfaction, leaving an uncompleted passage. “Our poor friend Hagen seems to be insane. Nietzsche’s book is causing our friends a lot of embarrassment.”
At lunch, when talking about this transposition, R. comes to the subject of Bach’s fugues, in most of which there is hardly ever a modulation: “It is like a cosmic system, which moves according to eternal laws, without feeling; the sorrows of the world are indeed reflected in it, but not in the same way as in other music.” Similarly, he says, he has used only one strong modulation in the Parsifal Prelude. Regarding Kundry’s “die Liebe lerne kennen” [“learn to understand love”], he says he has not given it “Tristan” flavor as when Isolde speaks of Frau Minne [Lady Love]: “It is quite different.”
Gay lunch with anecdotes about Frederick the Great told by R., among them one which was new to him concerning a man whom he put under house arrest and who tried to escape by pretending to have a toothache; in the end he was obliged to have a good tooth pulled: “Now tell me, have you been lying to me?” The Renz Circus is preparing a Rhinemaidens’ scene and a “Ride of the Valkyries.”
In the afternoon R. sits with me on the bench and enjoys the greenery which the curving hills of our countryside spread in varying shades before his eyes. The fountain brings to his mind the savage force of water which a dam or even a faucet can tame: “This is what gave Goethe his ideas on culture, that is fine.” A swallow flies over our heads: “What a beautiful creature! It has some of the qualities of a bat - it is the daytime bat.” Oh, how we enjoy these hours! In the evening, when he gets a bit heated, he says, “I have drunk too much beer and then I become quarrelsome and overly touchy, like K. Schumann.”
A crucifix I saw yesterday at Dr. Berr’s, by a master of the Veit Stoss school, made a very deep impression on me, and today I still find myself thinking about its facial expression and gestures whenever some painful or selfish emotion stirs in me. Of Weber’s Invitation to the Dance R. says: “If only people understood how to perform it! In Paris, where Berlioz orchestrated it, they did all the steps. But it is a full-blooded love display: following the tender glances and gestures, the first approaches, the man proudly shows what he is. It is unique.”