Sunday, September 29:
Again a disturbed night for R., but he works, and before going off to work he says as he embraces me: “As long as all is well between us! But I don’t think anything could ever not be well between us.” Shortly before one o’clock he fetches me for lunch and seems to me to be looking pale, which deeply worries me — worse than that, it stands like a specter between life and myself. But our lunch is not sad. Herr Kellermann is questioned by R., and various new details are added to the dismal picture we have of life in the world outside. After lunch a walk with Malw.; on our way home I see R. standing motionless some distance away, he had recognized us from afar and was standing waiting; we return home with him, and then he continues his walk and afterward works.
In the evening the children sing folk songs, R. accompanying them, and then young Brandt, with whom we go through our experiences, pleasant as well as painful. R. says he allows no outsider the right to condemn the Ring production, which as a whole was so beautiful and beyond compare: “But among ourselves we must acknowledge that much was not as it should have been; for example, the meadow of the gods before Valhalla not free enough, too restricted by the steps; Erda’s cave reminiscent of a door in the usual sort of fantastic comedy show; the steam transformation to Nibelheim — there should have been shafts in it, a backcloth which could have been drawn up lengthways, showing these shafts and now and again a fiery glow; then the mountaintop was too high — I shall alter that one day, when I produce Die Walküre in Heaven at the right hand of God, and the old fellow and I are watching it — the acting area too narrow, so that the fight was spoiled and Wotan’s storming in a failure; in Siegfried, steps again, and not enough room for the fight; and steps also hindering Brünnhilde’s struggles, too little room for the Rhinemaidens, and the water sweeping over the funeral pyre, and the hall of the Gibichungs not impressive enough. Then the costumes bad, almost all of them. And so it turned out that this production, as far as the conception was concerned, was on the whole extraordinary, wrong in only a few details.” R. talks of his suffering at the time, the patience with which he kept silent about it all!