Wednesday, October 2:
At last R. had a good night. When I embrace him after breakfast, he says, “That is it, that is my image, the look that came back to me.” He works. Our conversation leads us to modern surgery, its boldness and frequent foolhardiness. R. tells me about his friend Anders’s broken leg, and how a doctor deliberately broke the knee of someone with a bad leg, and how in consequence he was cured.
He goes for a walk, though when I am strolling in the garden I hear him playing the piano, and then continues to work in the evening. When Herr Kellermann mentions the poet Wolff, R. recalls his Pied Piper of Hamelin and praises him, in spite of some affectations in the careless modern manner; with regard to the same poet’s Till Eulenspiegel, he says the name Till is the same as Tell. When I ask him whether Schiller was thinking of the word’s meaning when he wrote, “If I were prudent, I should not be Tell,” R. says he does not know, and he adds, “If I were a blockhead, I should not be Wagner, for all the Wagners are people of great and special genius, as one can see from Faust.”
After supper we come to talk about his Beethoven story, and he recalls in amusement that his sister Ottilie had known Reichardt, and the anecdote about the X had been told him by Schindler’s sister, a singer in Magdeburg. In the evening Der gestiefelte Kater, which R.’s manner of reading transforms into unparalleled delight. He says there is no longer a public like the one held up to ridicule in it. Referring to the King, he says it is true one has to treat all princes as if they were madmen, avoiding this and that subject in conversation with them. My enjoyment in the way he read this splendid work lasts a long time; what pleases him about it is what he calls its Aristophanic flavor.