Thursday, July 18:
In the morning R. says to me, “Oh, yes, it was on the Brünig that I promised you the Tristan march and all the other marches.” I: “You have done much more than you promised.” He: “Yes, I didn’t promise Parsifal!”
He works on his article and tells me that he wants to continue with it, so as not to have to think any more about the Bayreuth Bl. for some time. He is glad that we are having lunch alone together upstairs, says it is like on our travels. When he came in he was complaining of pains in his chest, but then he grew increasingly cheerful, and suddenly he said with a laugh: “Pigtails! How funny that human beings should feel the need to replace their vanished tails in that way!”
As he left me, he said, “Do you know that sometimes, when I have a musical thought, I catch myself with my mouth set just like Beethoven’s in his death mask?”
We have supper on the balcony, just the two of us, the happiest of existences. R. watches the sunset, I his face; he talks about the birds, for whom these woods, these green variations, are the earth, on which they suddenly swoop down. He talks of his letters to the King, saying that posterity, if it ever came to know of them, would not understand the tone in which they were written.
I: “You have idealized every situation in which you found yourself.” He: “I feel a great longing one day to reveal the awful truth about them.”
He returns to the set mouth and says: “I demonstrated it to you quite wrong, the lower lip should not be thrust forward, it is a grimace of clenched teeth, of keeping silent.” I: “Probably peculiar to musicians.” He: “Yes, very often, when I am in the grip of some musical idea, I fall asleep like this; it is a sort of enforced silence, from which the sound then emerges.”
Afterward R. goes for a walk in the palace gardens with the children. They saw fireflies and asked about them; telling me about it, R. says: “What is one telling them when one says it is phosphorus? It’s like all our science today and its significance in life.”
Then I read aloud Lulu’s letter — to him who is my support, my adviser in all things! He then goes away, and I stay behind to complete my notebook. Attempt to rescue with roses a butterfly which is fluttering around the lamp. In vain, alas! The light kills, the rose just smells sweet. (He wrote to Herr v. Hagen.)