Friday, July 5:
Raw weather; but R. goes for a walk with the children and tells me about a blackbird which warbles its call twice with trumpetlike clarity, and another, a wheatear, which endlessly twitters and then all at once breaks off. Herr Cyriax sends all kinds of things; R.: “I like people who make presents to my wife, but who are in fact just going along with my secret intentions!”
He reads the Récits mérovingiens with enjoyment. I speak earnestly to friend W. He brings a letter from Herr Tappert, who is going through a very bad time. When I tell R. this, he decides to send him 500 marks as an advance payment for newspaper articles.
After lunch R. says, “If I were rich, nobody would ever hear a note of Parsifal; I should bequeath it to Fidi, so that he could give it out as his own work and draw royalties on it till 30 years after his death.” “I have continued the canon,” he tells me. “I have found a very pretty turn. Later I shall write only such things, they don’t have to be in four movements, and I shall ask Lachner for his formula for suites; I have a whole host of similar ideas which I haven’t yet used. I shall also find time to write a play, Futhes Wedding, in prose.” In connection with the newspaper article R. says to me, “Now you can sing ‘O Richard, ô mon roi, tous les juifs l’abandonnent’ [‘Oh, Richard, oh, my King, all the Jews are abandoning him’].”
We go to see friend Feustel to settle the Tappert matter. F. says the Emperor has now recovered and asks R. whether he would like to express his pleasure in writing. R.: “Oh, the Emperor would just ask himself: ‘What does he want? Ah, he has that deficit, he needs money!’ ”
We walk home through the palace gardens, and R. points out his blackbird and the wheatear, which are both singing again. In the evening R. takes up Olimpie again, the Overture to which he likes very much. He tells me about his dream; that Beethoven had wanted to do some work on Fidelio and had run through a wall - “It’s always something either too ridiculous or bad, just to wake one up.”