Monday, October 21:
R. woke up once during the night and got up, but he soon calmed down, got back into bed, and slept soundly. I tell him in the morning that I prayed for his rest. “To whom?” “I don’t know, I just knew that I inwardly wished and pleaded for your rest.” “Yes, if anybody could understand these mysteries—” And that brings us jokingly back to Porges! In a dream he saw some large birds with no eyes in their sockets. But in the morning he woke up cheerful and sang quite an assortment of melodies, my father’s “Loreley,” “Am stillen Herd,” then jokingly challenged me to sing him one single melody by Schumann. Then he exclaims: “A melody! What a heavenly thing that is, wrapping everything in purity, ennobling it! When one hears something like that, one has the feeling that nothing ever existed before, as if everything is now beginning to breathe for the first time.” He then sings the melody of the Countess’s second aria in Figaro: “There is nothing there to see, nothing to grasp hold of, yet it goes beyond everything, even the graceful gestures of the most exalted moments, which are what come nearest to melody.” When he takes leave of me, he embraces me and says: “Everything is all right! So it was and so it will be!” We go to our work, I hear the sounds of music again!
When R. fetches me for lunch, he says, “Now I am writing something which should sound like nothing, nothing at all, Robert Schumann, but there must be method in it - the theme of the march would have been much too definite.” His eye is hurting him, he sprayed something in it; when I ask him about it later, he says: “Already better. It’s just that I have to make a great fuss, then I’m ashamed of myself, and it’s all right.” Over coffee, while I am saying something or other, he exclaims, “That’s it - it must be shifted half a bar, held back half a bar.” All the time he is noting things down, a musical or some other idea, but if he were to carry a notebook around with him, he says, and think to himself, “Today you must write something down,” without a doubt nothing would occur to him. He tells me that again today a theme came to him with which he can do nothing - his room is full of such scraps. Drinking his coffee, he looks at the Wolzogen house and praises it as a kind of creative act in itself. After his afternoon rest we go there together, and then he suggests that I go with him to Angermann’s. I say, “With pleasure,” and we carry through our “adventure” in merry mood. R. leads me into the empty “notabilities’ room,” very odd, “Oh, that’s the real thing,” we sit down opposite each other, and a very gay mood takes possession of us, a mood which not even Frau Angermann’s chatter (she greets me as “Frau Meister”) can disturb. The dogs are also with us. After a little while we walk home, still accompanied by heavy rain. R. writes a letter to friend Feustel about raising our friend Wolzogen’s salary.
Over coffee we again talk about the peculiar calm and security legitimacy imparts to princes - R. observes that this is what the Roman emperors lacked, and that to some extent explains their excesses. Yesterday he came back again to his music of mourning for the men who fell in the war, and said he would make use of the Prussian piccolos in it. In the evening I read to R. part of Luther’s letter “To the Aristocracy of the German Nation,” with great interest and admiration. R. agrees with me when I say a similar sort of letter should now be written about the Israelites to - well, to whom? R. compares our present aristocrats with those of Luther’s time: “One has only to look at the way they dressed,” he says with a laugh. I observe jokingly that in this case the letter should be addressed to the socialists. He is the only person I know whose heart beats so powerfully with compassionate anger: what L[uther] was for religion, so is he for art, but he is the only one, much more “unified” with his work than even Luther was. We look at the pictures of the “phonomotor” in the Illustrirte Zeitung, and R. sets it aside jokingly: “You are my phonomotor.” I go to bed with great worry on my mind, for it looks to me as if R.’s stomach is very swollen; my worry gnaws at me, and after R. has gently fallen asleep, I take refuge in prayer, call upon the kind and gracious fate which raised me so high, praise it, and implore it for mercy, mercy!