Saturday, September 28:
R. had a good night, he tells me that he has ordered the Bulwer-Lytton novels for Lusch, and he talks again about the impression they made on him, how in Eugene Aram he had found it almost impossible to believe in the murder. He works. Around two o’clock arrival of Herr Kellermann, “l’homme du caveau” as R. calls him, typical of the wretched times of today. At the conservatory he was paid 1,200 marks by Herr Stern; when he said he was leaving, the latter offered him 5,000! Before that he had delivered newspapers in order to be able to complete his studies, and was glad when he was ill, for then he did not need to eat! He went to Berlin to learn about acoustics from Helmholtz, and was thus inspired by all the best human motives, but all he discovered there was hunger and exploitation of his willingness to work. His father is a professor of natural science in Nürnberg. A very decent and lively person who, let us hope, will find salvation here, yet how many there are, people of the best character and ideals who fall by the wayside! R. does some work in the afternoon but is vexed by the lack of precision in so many people, whereas he himself is always so scrupulously punctual and exact!
In the evening he plays the third act of Tristan. When I voice my wonder that he could have completed this miracle in a hotel room, with not a soul to look after or care for him, he says: “Yes, people have no idea how divorced from experience and reality these things happen, and how long one is nourished by one’s youth! It is true I sometimes felt inclined in my disgust to throw everything into the gutter, and in fact I eventually did so, unwilling as I was to do any more work; but when the German Emperor exclaims, ‘How deeply Wagner must have been in love at that time,’ it is really quite ridiculous. If that were so, I should now be writing Parsifal on account of my connections with the Christian church, and you would be Kundry! No, I just felt the need to go to the very limit musically, as if I had been writing a symphony.” When, later on, I tell R. how much I regret not having been with him earlier, always, he says, “Yes, I was born too soon.” Then he adds with a laugh: “I ought to have come under the influence of Mendelssohn and Meyerbeer! No, Weber was a blessing to me.” Recently he was beside himself with delight over the “Jungfernkranz” chorus in Der Freischütz. “It is supposed to be a Silesian folk song,” he said, “but the way the words ‘green and lovely,’ that exclamation of ecstasy, emerge from the simple phrase ‘We bind for thee’ — that is typical Weber!” Then he laughs at the thought that Polish Jews would soon be enjoying the Ring in Leipzig, at the fair: “Well, one of them was my entire audience for Das Liebesverbot.” A chorale by J. S. Bach, sent by Herr Levi, astonishes us with the boldness of its modulations, but R. does not quite trust the “many beauties,” for Bach was after all a cantor and was writing all day long. “The 48 Preludes and Fugues and the motets — those are the pearls.”