Sunday, September 22:
I return to our final topic of last night and tell R. how splendid it is that the Ring in particular should make such an impact, for it was to create this work that he had been sent into the world. “Not at all; it was to marry you,” and, turning things around in his humorous way, he adds: “That’s why you had to go and marry Bülow! The Lord did to you what Lüttichau did to me over the decorations for the production, started off with a refusal, to enhance the value of the thing.”
Pleased with having all the children here together, he says, “They are our riches.” He goes to work, still complaining of his “Hafiness”; I listen in patience and sympathy to “Renatus.” With regard to Israel, R. says it is when it is well behaved that it really becomes alarming. In the evening R. is in the most splendid high spirits, even his most dismal of experiences he describes gaily. Of an opera called Nero he inquires, “Is that a watchdog?,” and of Messalina he wants to know whether many mesalliances occur in it! He complains with indescribable humor that now, when he has to compose Kundry, nothing has come into his head but cheerful themes for symphonies. Then he speaks of the canon, in which each singer has to follow the other, the first gets annoyed and growls a bit, then continues, only to get annoyed again when the others follow him. He says he will call his symphonies “symphonic dialogues,” for he would not compose four movements in the old style; but theme and countertheme one must have, and allow these to speak to each other. There is nothing of that kind in the whole of Brahms’s symphony, he says. Then he tells us about the lean Brahms who had corrected instrumental parts for him in Vienna, and whom he then rediscovered “fattened up” by fame. He says he has often sung to himself themes from Mendelssohn but found it impossible to do the same with Schumann, whereas with Brahms he had really begun to doubt his musical receptivity till his pleasure in Sgambati showed him he was still capable of taking things in. R. goes through Handel’s Alexander’s Feast; the skip in particular pleases him, and he says Handel was the Rossini of his time. He tells Herr L. that attention must now be drawn to his theoretical writings.