Sunday, October 20:
R. had a good night! In the morning we talk about Catholicism and how impossible it is to reach agreement with the Catholics: the subject came up because of a reply by our friend W. in the Schlesische Zeitung. “Christ and the Gospels will live forever,” R. says, but with the founding of the church and the interpolations in the Gospels everything was spoiled, for the first Christians saw the second coming of Christ as an abolition of the world, an end to earthly existence.
Then R. says we ought to write some dialogues together, for instance, a pessimist and an optimist on the present situation in Germany, but he says he wants to be the “stupid” one. I heard no sounds of music in the morning, and at lunch he tells me he ought to have two drawers always open for scraps of paper, one for music, the other for prose, for the B. Blatter. He brings all kinds of mail to the table, among it a very nice letter from the Spaniard Marsillach. After lunch he describes the remark by Windthorst, “We are the conservatives, you, the Conservatives, are reactionaries, because you want to upset the existing order,” as an excellent one. He regrets that W[indthorst] is unable, on account of his party, to speak openly. “A bad business,” R. says again, with reference to the dethronement of the German princes. At lunch he says with a laugh that no doubt our Society would look very suspicious to Bismarck, and they would confiscate our funds; like the Roman emperors, they feared nothing so much as secret organizations.
In the afternoon R. and I go out, calling on Wolzogen, whose article, “The Stage Dedication Play,” pleases R. very much, though he remarks to me that W. goes too far in calling Parsifal a reflection of the Redeemer: “I didn’t give the Redeemer a thought when I wrote it.” In the evening Herr K. tells us of the uses to which the Niagara Falls are being put; R. replies, “Our good Lord must be clutching his head in exasperation.” Then he reads the first act of Die Meistersinger to me and the girls. Shared memories! Impossible to believe it was ten years ago! “Though we, you and I, haven’t altered at all.” I tell him that only the four years before that had seemed long, in spite of the flashes of joy which lit them up, but since the decision life has flown by.
Before the reading he played Auber’s summons to the meeting in the market place and found great enjoyment in it; altogether he thinks frequently of Auber, particularly his genius in writing for the trumpet. This leads him to the Prussian trumpet, which lacks a D, and now the whole of Germany has been obliged to adopt it: “It is supposed to sound a signal over a long distance,” he adds, more as an explanation than as a consolation. Toward the end of the evening he plays the finale of Die Zauberflöte, “where the sun went the other way,” and exclaims: “Oh, how beautiful that sounds! How beautiful these sopranos can be!” When we are alone, we read bits from Porges’s article in the B. Bl. R. says he read the whole thing today, but he cannot remember a word of it, his mind had wandered to all sorts of other things. Certain expressions, such as “the crisis is established in a human being,” cause us great merriment, and R. says, “The best one can say is that he gives us things which other people before him have said ten times better.”