Friday, October 11:
He had a good night and is feeling quite well; the pleasure of having worked well was responsible for his nice rest. He tells me he will soon be finished with the 2nd act.
Then he talks about his treatment of the orchestra in Parsifal, saying that in the Nibelungen he did not have the singers for the orchestra, he had sometimes put them on too elevated a cothurnus, and they had not been able to dominate the orchestra; the singer should be like a single instrument, like a clarinet, for example Materna in the scene with Waltraute. When I say that it was precisely in this scene that the balance seemed to me so wonderful, he says, “I am talking about the passionate scenes. I just did not have singers who could dominate.”
Thinking of friend Seidl working as a coach, he says: “It will be quite good for him. I started in Würzburg with Paer's Camilla and found the wide pages difficult, but I soon learned my way about.” Then he enumerates Auber's comic operas and says there is something witty in each of them.
He comes to fetch me before lunch and reads me his article, which he calls a proper school essay, “such an effusion”; it is splendid. Recently he said, “I don't know how Wolz. does it. He always produces such a lot of manuscript pages, whereas mine look like nothing at all.” He says I am to blame, because once, when he was enlarging upon my father, I told him he ought to write it down.
Over coffee I read the King's letter to him, very nice. R. says with a laugh, “I shall now have to write an even better one. Can't even show my letters to my wife: it would be a downright insult!” When I ask him whether he loves me, he replies, “My whole life, work, and being tell you that.”
When I speak to R. about experiments now being made in Strassburg on dogs, involving the removal of the cerebrum, and Malwida explains the reason for them, R. gives her a terrible look, his face white, his head thrown back, and expresses his repugnance for such senseless crimes, which will never bring people any nearer to the nature of things.
He goes out in the afternoon; I go to meet him, golden rays of sunshine on the yellow leaves, a mild radiance, reminding me of him. Happy meeting in the market place. I tell him I have been thinking over what he says in his article about immortality, that that which is contemporary in a work, its mortality, deprives it of the possibility of gaining a living immortality; then, when its immortal significance is understood and recognized, it can never establish itself fully. “A melancholy state of affairs!” R. replies.
He works, and before supper shows me that the 2nd act is finished! Blessings on this glorious child of sorrow! I tell R. that I feel he is not showing nearly enough joy in this event.
Conversation on all kinds of subjects, among other things the sin against the Holy Ghost, which leads R. to read us something from the book on religious sects, but we find it rather boring and laugh at our tormenting ourselves with it. More thoughts in the evening about the 10th, this was the day on which the 2nd act was in fact completed, but R. says he would have overtired himself if he had written it down then. “You were Isolde,” R. says. “You married Marke, with the difference that in this case Marke was the nephew, a curious relationship.”