Thursday, August 1:
R. says laughingly that he comes to offer me my breakfast on ashes, and we embark gaily on this day, on which Heaven shines dimly! Loldi is very much better; R. works, but he does not seem fully satisfied, says a violin passage - "I am working for Wilhelm" - is bothering him, he has already written so many of them!
A visit from the conductor Levi, by no means unpleasant, and, as R. says, in his Jewish way he is very touching. R. goes with him to Angermann's, I meant to arrange a rendezvous with R. in the palace gardens, but the awful weather restrained me - this summer truly "the winter of our discontent"!
R. reads Barante's Ducs de Bourgogne and is very pleased with the depiction of Joan of Arc. He finds the anonymous story of Bluebeard and the virgin an excellent theme: "I should like to suggest it to some Frenchman as a subject." In the evening conversation turns to the impending denunciations, regret that a stop is not put to them from above. To end with, R. plays the Prelude to Parsifal; long since we last heard it, renewed impression!
He says he would not dare give the "Nehmet hin" theme to a single instrument, an oboe or a clarinet, for he could not trust present-day instrumentalists to play it with the proper feeling, in the way the clarinetist, for instance, whom Weber had trained, and who had still been active in R.'s time, had played the theme from Preciosa. I permit myself to remark that, I too, feel that his orchestra has a different significance and that individual effort, left entirely to the singer, has no place in it as in Weber, and also in the Beethoven symphonies. He agrees with me. As always when guests have been with us, our return to being alone together makes us cheerful and blissful!