Thursday, August 15:
R. had a good night and laughs with me over a scene in the Ducs de Bourgogne which amused him greatly, namely, the scene in which Charles the Bold is expecting the King’s crown, and Frederick III, to avoid giving it to him, departs secretly for Cologne in the early morning on a ship. Then he talks about “old” Jehovah in the burning bush, “like old Ziethen.”
Cheered by our morning conversation, we go each to our own work, but unfortunately guests soon tear us away from it. The presence of Herr Sucher, the conductor in Leipzig, and his wife obliges R. to make conversation about things he now finds disagreeable; then the change of diet for our meal, in short, it all has a bad effect on him, and after his afternoon rest he comes to me looking worn out. “Everything one hears about the outside world only upsets one,” he says. He tells me he has written to Zumpe. “Zumpe and Wolzogen are the two opposite poles of which I am the center—they know nothing about each other.” Of the conductor Sucher: “He is a typical Musikant, a brand of persons who do not really belong to me. Brendel was right when he said once that present-day musicians, your father and I, differ from all previous ones by possessing intellectual faces; intellectuality is not a quality of musicians.”
“Lucky that the self is divided, that both of me can be with you,” he adds, “for otherwise there is nobody with whom one can talk.” Letter from our dear Frau Materna: R. praises her as the only one who is warm and natural. Recently he said that, if all else failed, he would engage her for Kundry after all. Delight in the children, in Fidi’s sketchbook, towns: Wankel, Buheborn, etc., and in the names they give to the workmen building the aviary; one of them, who stretched himself out on a bundle of brushwood and covered his head, they have named the Sleeping Beauty, for instance.
In the evening Boni reads to us from Opera and Drama, which I find more and more absorbing; the words on Ariosto, on Iphigenia, and the comparison with Beethoven’s symphonic form are utterly superb, perhaps not quite easy to grasp for those who cannot distinguish between a work of art and an artistic phenomenon. R. shares my pleasure. “It is all an idea,” he says, “and I can remember with what passion I wrote it. It is a protracted duologue, with Sulzer, for example, to whom I wanted to clarify all the things which had become clear and definite to me in the graphs, for this reason alone.” A lovely evening, exchanging such impressions and thoughts.