Monday, July 1:
R. up once, the cure does not seem to be helping him at all; my main fear is that his cheerfulness is deceiving me - Ah, life, life, borne on wings, woven from love, how painful are thy thorns!
In the morning R. places the little aromatic lamp which “Kundry” gave him on the 22nd in my dressing room, thereby bringing me his fragrant greeting!
The two children leave with the Wolzogens. R. at the station after all, though this kind of parting upsets him, particularly the waiting around after the goodbyes. In the afternoon, while I am walking in the garden with R., the conductor Levi (who was expected) comes to join us; he has realized that no good production of the King is possible outside Bayreuth. R. complains about the trend of wanting to do it differently from the way he did it here.
In the morning I read [Schiller’s] Wilhelm Tell with Boni and, worried at the way this splendid work is jeopardized by its iambic pentameter, which makes the words of the sentries guarding the governor’s hat, for example, seem so unnatural, I tell R. that I should like to see Die Meistersinger compared with Tell, purely in relation to the language, with the music left entirely aside. All the time I felt tempted, I said, to skip the verse in order not to lose the children’s sympathy and attention. R. says, “How curious - when I was thinking today about Levi’s visit, there came into my mind the verse ‘Today is Simon and Judah, the lake is wild and wants its sacrifices.’ ” We laugh.
He got a nice letter from Const. Frantz, whose article in the Bayreuther Blätter seems to have caused bad blood; Levi mentions it, and Tappert has written to friend W. that many people intend to protest. “All the better,” says R. “Those who are not with us are at liberty to go.” The publisher Schmeitzner really has printed extracts from N.’s book as a supplement to the Bayreuther Blätter. Herr L[evi] feels that a man like N. is too good for that, and R. laughs over the qui pro quo. Much talk about tempi, R. feels it is “impossible to mark them.”