Wednesday, October 30:
“Take heed only of the eternal, not the transient” — that was R.’s parting word to me today. He works, and after lunch gaily tells me his dream: Minna and he had been together; she was unpleasant. He: “You know we’re separated,” whereupon she gave him such a sorrowful look that he felt stricken. Then he thought of his position at the Grand Opera, from which he was drawing 6,000 francs annually; he could not very well show his face there, but he decided to ask Nuitter to fetch the money and send it to Minna. Then he went into a tavern for some cognac, could not find any at once, the people upset, then unpleasant, he replied, then lost courage when things threatened to become dangerous, whereupon he awoke. He had to get up twice in the night, and he read Lecky about the influence of Christianity on the position of slaves.
After lunch he goes out, I do some shopping, and we meet on our way home; he says, “I’m saying nothing, but there’s something I want to change, though not at once.” I beg him not to do it, to remember the quintet in Die Meistersinger, which he thought bad until he played it to me. I was moved to tears, and he then kept it. Then he tells me, somewhat later, when we part after our meeting, that the [Good Friday] meadow will be in D major, in f time. In the evening he plays the piano with Lusch, who does very well, sight-reading the three marches. Before that he played all sorts of things to the five children, who settled down beneath the piano, the greeting to the King of Saxony, and the songs “Mignonne” and “Dors”; when I express my continued pleasure in them, particularly “Mignonne,” he asks me whether I think they would make the same impression in a Paris salon; people there were too heartless to appreciate such idealized images. I had told him that I saw in them that quality of tender, smiling resignation which is also characteristic of the French.
Then he recalls Pauline Viardot, who had discerned enough in the songs to remark on them, but she did not then sing them: that shows what she was like, he says. A lovely evening, which I can see living on in the girls’ memory.
Thursday, October 31:
R. slept well; we talk about the marches (yesterday he felt bitter about the fate of the “Kaisermarsch”); he said how strange, that is to say, how new, all these things seemed to him: he looked upon them now with complete objectivity. I ask him whether that does not happen with everything one writes — letters, for instance. He agrees, observing that it is as if one were always playacting. R. in his kindness today writes to friend Seidl, though the latter has not written at all, to inform him of the progress of negotiations with Trieste and Brunswick.
Yesterday he intended to read more Luther, but one cannot spend too much time with it, he feels. Then, still at breakfast, we discuss first the meadow, which will be “a pastoral,” he says with a laugh, then a visit one day to Spain. R. feels a great antipathy toward visiting any town in Germany, says he cannot think of one he would enjoy seeing again.
At lunch, after his work, he asks Eva where she would prefer to go, to Barcelona or Heinrichsreuth. “Where do we leave the ship?” “In Eurigsroda!” he says with a laugh. A very nice letter from Mimi Schl. shows us clearly how little the outside world now means to us. “How many people we have outlived!” R. says, then complains that he has never met any truly free people — “at best only eccentrics.”
In the afternoon I walk to the Rollwenzel tavern with my own and the little Staff children plus the three dogs — a company of 12. R. comes to meet us on our return and we walk into town, after offloading the children and the dogs — he to Angermann’s, I to the Jager children, temporarily orphaned. He finds me at the confectioner’s; we return home, and he goes to his work. He stays with it until eight o’clock and is afterward preoccupied. We spend the evening alone, after playing, as yesterday, to the children sitting beneath the piano — bits from Die Walküre and “Ach, du lieber Augustin” with a pompous introduction.
He plays the prelude to me; it is very much altered, even more gloomy. It begins like the lament of an extinguished star, after which one discerns, like gestures, Parsifal’s arduous wanderings and Kundry’s pleas for salvation. [Added in margin: “That is to say, not the lament, but the sounds of extinction, out of which lamenting emerges. — ‘My preludes must all be elemental, not dramatic like the Leonore Overtures, for that makes the drama superfluous.’ ”] It seems as if none of this could be sung — only the elemental quality can be felt here, as R. does indeed emphasize. “People will say,” he remarks jokingly, “that if Amfortas had seen the vision of the Grail and heard the lament, he could have carried out the task of salvation as well as Parsifal!” “But just as a professional task,” say I, “and if Parsifal had listened to Kundry, she would have laughed, and then everything would have been all right, too!” Lengthy discussion about this new miracle.
Friday, November 1:
Everything exacts its price — R. had a bad night and had to get up twice! He read Lecky and discovered, he tells me, that the Christian reliance on alms had ruined countries such as Spain and Italy. Strangely, France had managed to avoid such excesses, being a country in which a certain common sense prevails generally, but this means that it possesses neither the Catholics’ great productivity nor the Protestants’ urge for freedom.
As I, returning from my bath, sit down to breakfast with him, he says: “I was just thinking that it is only since I have been with you that I have had the feeling of a home; when I furnished a place and made it comfortable previously, as, for example, in Zurich, I always had a bad conscience, so to speak, as if I knew that it would not last, that everything would soon break up. That shows how unsound much of my life was.” But with how much more justice can I declare that it was he who made a home for me!... I then tell him about one of our cocks, whose melancholy call today reminded me of the beginning of his prelude. R. says he knows what I mean and it is true: it is the diminished fifth which sounds so peculiar; he would call this his cock theme. Then he tells me of a green material with which he has turned his chair into an arbor. “But then I am obliged to compose such dismal things,” he says with a laugh. “People will think I must have written such stuff in an attic, starving and freezing!” We go our separate ways laughing.
More houses from our good friend Glasenapp! Even R. takes pleasure in them, particularly the Knevels house. At lunch he relates his dream to me and the children: Lenbach was giving a party for us, and then I was sitting with Lenbach in a sort of office, and this annoyed R. Over coffee he exclaims, “When I think of Vienna, how lonely I always was there!” He tells me of a walk he took with Friederike Meyer to Sperl, having in his memory the merry bustle of Vienna in the years around 1830, when old Strauss was still alive and he first got to know it; but by this time it had become melancholy and dreary, nobody there but “a few Jews with good-for-nothing women,” and all so dull!
Some shopping for me, after which, as always, a gay reunion with R. In the evening he shows me Tappert’s periodical, and when I tell him that musical periodicals make me almost sadder than ordinary newspapers, he replies, “Yes, because they affect us more closely — it’s like the resemblance between apes and men.” R. and I then go with the three little ones to welcome the Wolzogens with champagne in their new house; the idea came from R., and he laughs at my readiness to comply, which reminds him of that wheelbarrow in Frankfurt: “That’s how one should be!” he exclaims. The wheelbarrow has become for me the celestial Wain, in which he bears me on and on toward our spiritual home.
Returning from the W.’s, we have coffee, then he plays first of all the Alla Marcia movement of Beethoven’s A Minor Quartet (R. wanted to show me what a “fraud” the marches of B. are — they have just been advertised in an arrangement for piano duet by Kirchner); then he plays the following movement as a piano duet with me, amid much laughter at our clumsiness. Then we talk about God. I say that for me my fate represents God, omnipotence and benevolence: when it is revealed in that form, one cannot do otherwise than believe. He then talks at length of the manifestation of divinity, something divorced entirely from time and space, which he says can be compared with electricity. “I must write another article about God,” he says with a laugh. Then he tells me what Lecky has to say about the insane behavior of the ascetics in the 4th century, and ends, as so often before, with jokes about the “excise.” “True through and through!” he exclaims to me as we return from the W.’s — oh, how was it possible that I be permitted to become the agent of his glory?