Wednesday, October 9:
R. got up once and took something which, he says, helped him. Our morning hour is again quite splendid today, we talk about the peculiarities of German humor, how traces of it can be found in the heroic epics, but no longer in the same way in Faust, since that contains more irony. I mention the Odyssey, and R. agrees with me, recalling with delight both the humor and rashness of Odysseus in taunting Polyphemus as his ship is in danger of being sunk by the rocks the giant hurled.
In the afternoon R. goes for a walk, then works on Parsifal by lamplight, “lichte, lachte”; he is satisfied with his work, and we are rewarded by a merry supper and a nice evening. R. mentions the action of Gloucester in Henry VI, how he goes to walk around the quadrangle of the palace and then returns; and he feels that this must have been mentioned in some chronicle. I ask him if he does not think the action was Shakespeare’s own invention: “It was certainly typical of Shakespeare to notice it and make use of it.”
At my request R. plays the two finales of Le nozze di Figaro, and this abundance of spirit, inventiveness, and wit in the musical flow delights and astounds us. “That is true mastery,” says R., and he points out how even the imperfect cadences, which have an unpleasant effect in the symphonies, are so right here, since they are part of the action, as it were, expressing the tumult and general disorder, until somebody is at last allowed to speak. Nothing differs more from the play Le Mariage de Figaro than the opera Le nozze di Figaro, he says, it is the most striking example of how music cannot help transfiguring things and revealing their basic innocence. The Count has accents like Ferdinand in Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe, the cunning, the treachery, it is all pure, and the excellently constructed play can only be helped by music. But the Italian language is essential, and Italians can no longer sing it! “Alas, a dead world,” R. sighs. We found great enjoyment in our engagement with this noble, luxuriant genius.
Before that R. sang to us “Les Deux Grenadiers” which we have just received and which I like very much. He laughed when he saw the picture by Kietzl. The skies were gray all day, the yellow crowns of the trees melancholy against this dreary background; all the same we were cheerful and gay as if safe in port from sorrow; he was well! In the evening R. writes to Richter! Of a rather silly English lady R. says, “She is an educated blockhead!” Regarding Frau Vogl’s leap into the funeral pyre, R. observes that he has in fact included it in his stage directions, and it is a part of the action, but if the audience’s attention is going to be drawn to it, he would prefer to cut it out.