Saturday, October 5:
Again R. did not sleep well, and again he thinks the beer he drank is to blame. He is affected when he is told in his bath that Runa has left; she is going to Aschaffenburg, she really was an unusual person, and we should have liked to keep her. Glorious weather, R. works on his article, tells us he is now on Calderón and must be careful not to go into too much detail, thus having to say to himself, like Polonius, “By the mass, I was about to say something.”
We drive in the most wonderful weather to the Eremitage, the children in front with the four dogs, a proper procession. Along the journey R. tells me in great indignation about the attached news item and says that with our German Reich we are now…
An attached newspaper clipping reads: “Political Roundup, Bayreuth, October 5: The American ambassador in Berlin, Bayard Taylor, has warned his fellow countrymen against visits in Germany, saying that, above all, they should never under any circumstances engage in political conversation if they wish to avoid unpleasantness. How can one reconcile this fact, so humiliating to us, with the claim, so often heard, that we are the most respected nation in the world?”
Merry homecoming; R. goes to his work, and when I go to him in the evening, he says I have come just in time for the kiss, “Was it my kiss that made you clairvoyant?”
In the evening he begins to read Das Erntefest but breaks off, saying he does not care for its style, the Dresden style of Kotzebue. He asks Herr K. to play the Overture to Jessonda with him, then plays several other things from this opera; the scene between the two Brahmans leads to Mozart’s immortal duologue between Tamino and the Priest what a gulf divides the two scenes, what aristocracy, what fire, what dramatic force in the latter! I wish everybody could hear R. play them. Herr K.’s mediocre sight-reading makes us remark on the deleterious influence of present-day piano playing, how all the young people, bewitched by my father’s personality, want to acquire what he was literally born with, and spend all their time practicing.