Saturday, July 13:
R. had quite a tolerable night. “At night one has to fight off demons, in the day donkeys and blockheads.”
When we separate, he says to me: “I was thinking early this morning what it is that a man of genius needs, independence protected by love. Your father, Beethoven, all these untamed fellows, they wanted just the independence.”
I: “They were none of them poets.” R.: “That’s true, musicians are only half-tamed creatures.”
Around lunchtime he comes to my room and shows me the travel adventures of Herr Will and Frau Vorstel, which he had been rereading with much emotion and merriment. He is very amused by the “mandarin,” and now he praises me — oh, dear! — and in such high-flown terms that I am almost consumed by melancholy.
Talking at lunch about the bust of myself, I say I should feel pretentious, giving away the full-size one, and that is why I should like reductions of it; he replies, “Where my bust stands, yours can, too.” I: “Oh, that is something different.” “Not at all, there have been lots of composers, but Cosimas are rare.”
The J. Zeitung, which prints a picture of a Renaissance ball in Weimar in connection with the Grand Duke’s jubilee, provokes R. into expressing his utter disgust for mummeries of this kind.
After lunch he again enjoins friend Seidl to study tempi, not to drag the adagios, not to rush the allegros. He cites the Andante in the A Major Symphony, for which Beethoven stipulated a very quick tempo; when the second theme is introduced, the tempo must be broadened, but at the end the march rhythm must be retained, and it is quite a different thing whether one is playing a theme for the first time or repeating it.
“But it is only the composer who can teach people that, which is why I wanted to set up my school, to teach it, for example, through Weber’s overtures. But that brings us back to the Reich!”
I do not know what brought him to the Julierberg, but he reminds me that it was on this mountain that he visualized Wotan and Fricka: “There, where all is silence, one imagines the beings who rule there, unaffected by the passage of time.”
The name Julierberg brings us to the Romans: “That was a true city system, city against city, until one city at last dominated all the other cities and formed a state. The ancient Germans, on the other hand, used a tribal system.” He compared the Frankish, the Merovingian tribes with the Pelopidae and other Greek tribes; naive cruelty, one must not underestimate the influence of Christianity, he says.
Arrival in the afternoon of our nice Fr[anziska] Ritter, sad accounts of the family. R.’s earnest and sympathetic expression as Franziska was speaking took up the whole of my attention — something of this expression, though only a little, is reflected in the photograph of Lenbach’s portrait. Resolve at all costs to help this man who was once so helpful to R.
To the Jagers’ in the evening; Herr Jager sings a passage from Siegfried, from “Mein Vöglein schwebte mir fort” to the end, much of it to R.’s great satisfaction, R. as the Wanderer wonderfully gripping. A nice evening, the only thing that vexes R. the way the audience remained seated in silence after a performance such as Jager gave: “If only at least they had risen to their feet!”
Merry walk home through the palace gardens. Once more to have heard Siegfried! ...