Monday, November 11:
R. had a good night, and we chatted about all sorts of things, beginning with “the wise Englishman Lecky,” then the “universal pest,” the Catholic church, then the theme of the variations in Beethoven’s E Major Sonata, which all pianists love to play and which has consequently become something of a trial for R., wonderful as it is. Gaily, but with deep, deep tenderness, we part, and I am writing the last lines in this book to the sounds of his music.
Just as no painter has ever succeeded, even through exaggeration, in conveying his look or his mouth, so I ask myself whether I can ever succeed here in giving my Siegfried even a faint reflection of his true nature. I am trying, but how, poor creature that I am, can I hope to succeed? Yet perhaps these pages will bring back to him the impressions he himself received from his father.
Yesterday R. expressed his regret that he could not yet take Siegfried in hand, that this was still a woman’s job; he said one could not come close to children just with clear explanations and answers to questions.
End of the eleventh notebook of the Diaries. The twelfth begins: “Will they be of any use, these pages? ... Will they be able to give you, my Siegfried, a picture of your father? I do not know. But remember one thing when you glance through them: that your mother has tried, amid the exertions and worries of the daily round, in the happiness and bliss of love, to preserve for you something which is eternal and ultimately had to be!” November 25, 1878, while supervising a dancing lesson.
Speaking the name Corelli in the French way, R. says that what chiefly annoys him about the French is their habit of pronouncing every word as if it were French, and never putting themselves to the trouble of imagining how other nations see things. At coffee time a telegram from Vienna, which he answers. He then sings the scene of Tamino’s parting from Pamina in Die Zauberflöte. “It is so pure,” he exclaims. “Why couldn’t any of the blockheads who followed Mozart declaim as beautifully as he did? Winter, for instance, in his Opferfest, and so on.”
He told me that after breakfast he never felt very well, and that he usually fell into a deathlike sleep, from which he always awoke refreshed. “When I am dozing off, I usually see, today for instance, your eyes, the Catholic ones, then the big, big, very solemn ones, and then I try to recall the Catholic look.”
Returning to the variations in the E Major Sonata, R. says that Beethoven loved this form and gave himself a treat in the variations; he, R., cannot do it. I observe that he could if he wanted to. R.: “No, you have to have it all at your fingertips, you must be able to improvise on the instrument.” Speaking of the sonata itself, he says it is much too easy for pianists who wish to make an impression with it, and Klindworth and others always reminded him of Bottom: “I have enough wit to serve my own turn.” This morning he quoted a verse from Marschner’s Vampyr, which led him to German musicians, so rough, so coarse, but with a certain feeling for pathos: much of Der Vampyr sounds as if it is from Der Dorfbarbier, he says.
In the afternoon he goes for a walk and returns vexed with the weather, which is gray and damp: “I would sooner be in Moscow. Anywhere but out of doors.” In the evening he plays the piano for a while, his songs Stehe still and Der Tannenbaum, the Albumblatt für Betty Schott, and a Bach prelude. “I like Bach better than myself,” he says with a laugh. “This music one really can call sublime! It always reminds me of old cathedrals, it is like the voice of the thing-in-itself; in comparison, the sensitive and the sentimental seem trivial; in Beethoven everything is dramatic. I sometimes feel I don’t want to hear anything more by Beethoven, I know the five sonatas. But Bach I should like to be able to play for myself.”