Thursday, August 8:
R. slept well and goes to work; while working, as he tells me, he was somewhat disturbed by the "banging," the thunderstorm was "like an old man in a rage hurling everything about." Talking to Kl. about his experiences in St. Petersburg, he says that the Prelude to Lohengrin was played so beautifully that, standing at the head of this orchestra of 140 players, he had a sort of Joan of Arc vision.
Then he talks of the marriages of most of his friends, and laughs: "They are all donkeys, except for me!" Friend Wok. comes and reads to me an article by Dr. Schemann, which astonishes us with its mixture of ideas, some sloppily and inaccurately expressed, some very good, and some rather perverse! R. goes for a walk with our friends, and after that a part of the first act of Parsifal; at Amfortas's words to Kundry R. says, "More languid, with calm deliberation: he loves another, whose name also begins with C."
In the evening reminiscences: Berlioz in Paris and in London, then the Tannhäuser affair, many good experiences, but the Germans always bad - for example, when R. wrote in his account of the production that the Jockey Club was to blame for the scandal, the German newspaper in Paris observed that others had been there as well; whereupon R. wrote to the editor, saying he was willing to concede that the Germans, his fellow countrymen, were also partly to blame. In the evening R. says to me regarding Parsifal: "I sometimes have my doubts about the scene, the coming and going during Gurnemanz's narration, and know how it ought to be." "Whatever you do, don't think of the production" is then his constant exhortation.