Sunday, October 6:
R. slept tolerably well; we return to our conversation of yesterday, and he says, “Yes, great genius destroys minor talents.” In connection with something or other he quotes, “This Falstaff has much virtue and an accursed wink,” and says he is so filled with admiration for such things that he feels downright annoyed when he reads Shakespeare out loud and every little thing is not received with acclamation; I tell him that in comparison to Shakespeare all other poetry seems to me like Renaissance sculpture against that of ancient Greece.
At lunch he is extraordinarily gay, at the start suddenly getting up to write something down, and sings us all sorts of things from La Favorita, Guillaume Tell, etc., in order to show us Duprez’s mannerisms; he also praises the text of La Favorita, which is very touching. Over coffee he speaks about the peculiarities of the musical profession and how he has been reproached for the eternal F time in Lohengrin: “I have in fact used F time in both Tannhäuser and Lohengrin, but only where it is needed, in the ‘Pilgrims’ Chorus,’ in the prayer before the duel; but otherwise the art lies in one’s ability to stick to oratio directa and not to tell oneself: Now I must make a change, just for change’s sake.” Musicians are in fact very petty people who do not know what is important, he says, but then, on the other hand, someone like Mozart comes along, who was like a child but never did anything silly.
[Added in margin: “A few days ago R. spoke in the most affecting way about the Weber ceremony in Dresden and how successfully he had arranged it: he said it was one of the loveliest moments he had ever experienced. He ended by saying that when Wilhelmine Schröder-Devrient ran out of the chapel with the laurel wreath, he and she ‘exchanged a curious look.’ ”]
After lunch, after he has rested, R. and I walk with the children and dogs to Angermann’s cellars outside the town, a very merry procession in Faustian mood over fields and meadows. Since Herr Angermann is not there, R. goes to meet him, walks and walks until he in fact reaches the tavern in town, wants then to ride back in a cab with the landlord and Brange. Brange, uncontrollable, determined to get out, jumps over the horse, R. then gets out too, retraces the whole long journey to us on foot, but is in the gayest of spirits. We sit beneath the trees in the same place he sat some time ago telling himself, “You must come back here with your little woman.”
Walk home by moonlight past the churchyard in the same animated procession, with the children calling, the dogs barking. Brange kills a cat. Delight in Bayreuth, the trees in the palace gardens, R. feels at home, and so do I; a splendid day, and evening too, I am filled with unutterable gratitude for R.’s bubbling spirits.
When the children gather around R. at the piano in the evening and he plays them the tarantella from La Muette de Portici, I think of the time when we shall no longer be here and these memories will live on inside them, and thus I enjoy the experience directly and at the same time in a transfigured way. R. relates many things from his childhood, how he brought home some rabbits and put them in a drawer; then how he heard Weber conducting an opera, Die Bürgschaft, by Mayer, the same man who in Der Freischütz played Kaspar and threw himself down flat in front of Samiel, in a way R. always tried to imitate. With his extraordinary memory he tells us all about this opera, the quartet at the end of the first act, the gloating tyrant, the people bidding their farewells: “I didn’t like that, but in the wedding in the second act, the brooding, melancholy friend leaning against a pillar—that I did like.” Then he talks about Der Freischütz, which he had watched Weber conduct from the actor’s box: “I should like to have seen myself!” It was Samiel above all who gripped him, and he was constantly whistling or trying to whistle the devil’s whistle. [Added in margin: “Concern about Fidi.”]
After that, and I do not remember what led to it, he reads aloud Aristophanes’s Frogs, up to the end of the second scene, and when I ask whether these plays were performed in the large theaters, he says he cannot imagine it himself, but one knows next to nothing about the theater of that time. Then yet more music from Jessonda. R. remarks on its peculiar silliness, in spite of many fine passages. He says this kind of silliness so disgusted him in Marschner, at the time he was orchestrating Tannhäuser, that he asked Reissiger to take over Der Templer und die Jüdin (“in which the whole orchestra plays throughout”), which he was supposed to conduct, though he was well aware of its finer features. A lovely end to a lovely day!