Thursday, July 11:
R. had a peaceful night; he dreamed that he had cut his finger with a razor and had to withdraw the knife carefully in order not to lose the whole finger!
He looks run down, and I can scarcely imagine a harder battle than that I fought to hide my concern. But I succeeded. At breakfast he conjures up a picture of a party of all our best friends together, all so shy and ill at ease, particularly our good Germans, like C. Frantz, etc. I laugh and say I am beginning to understand better and better the custom of having a court jester in cases where one is obliged to maintain a sort of court or party system. He laughs, and since I have come to the table in a brightly colored dress, which he likes, he says that at any rate the Harlequin costume is there.
As we part in the morning, he says to me, “Let us cling tight to each other, become more and more united.”
The gloomy weather always arouses in him lively thoughts of a stay in Italy. At lunch he informs us of various denunciations, and since we happen to have some new pickled herrings, which he enjoys, he exclaims, “I fear majesty crimes” — Middle High German abbreviation for “majesty”!
Friend Glasenapp and I finish the catalogue, then to R. Speaking of his library, he says he is not at all obsessed with books, and now that he has his collection, he will not buy any more.
In the evening he first of all played “for the children” the Andante from [Beethoven’s] A Major Symphony, to my indescribable delight, then for us the Prelude to Parsifal; he complains of the realistic, abstract nature of the piano, on which one always has to strike the notes, and I felt this must be particularly distracting for him in the Prelude to Parsifal.
In the evening he sends for all our friends; Herr Jager is to sing something from Siegfried. He sings the “Forging and Hammering Songs,” friend Seidl again getting the tempi wrong, that is to say, after the first “Nothung, Nothung,” which must be very broad, he drags it out as if it were narrative; “Then the melody gets lost,” says R.; and in the “Hammering Songs” he is too fast.
R. plays the American march with him as a piano duet, and this recalls to me the fate of the two marches, the “Kaisermarsch” and the “Centennial March,” and the consequent difference between them. Then R. takes out [Hakw?] shows us how good dramatically are the lines “I am a Christian!” and Recha’s following words, which are so disjointed.
When we say good night, R. uses such expressions to me, says such glorious things, that I do not dare write them down here — indeed I hardly dare preserve them in my heart! “What am I saying,” he concludes, “when I call you my one and only? That still implies some sort of comparison! ...”