Tuesday, November 12:
R. had a good night, but also a sad dream: I ran away with my father, so swiftly that he could not catch up with me; Kellermann blocked his path, saying I was already far away; in the evening I returned, very serious and silent, R. sad, but the beds full of watering cans and old metal!
“How many generations have I outlived!” he says. “When I think of Tausig and Cornelius, who entered my life so late, and Mendelssohn, already 30 years dead, and it seems only 5 years ago.” He describes how Schumann was introduced and played his ABEGG Variations — “full of ornaments, something I hated at that time.”
Then he sings the C Major Overture: “I should like to play it for you one day: it’s impossible to take it too fast, one shouldn’t really know what is going on, it must sound completely mad, for the theme is not of sufficient significance, though I can see what induced him to select these sequences; it has to sound completely mad.” He also starts singing one of the Gellert-Beethoven songs (“Vom Tode”), and when I praise it he says with a laugh, “But it’s asking a lot of anybody to sing it.”
He comes upstairs to fetch me, sits down beside me, and suddenly laughs about Gurnemanz’s herbs and roots: “He sounds so cross, so disgruntled.” Then he became a bit impatient and said, “If you only knew!” And soon I do know, for when I enter the salon, I see a magnificent Persian carpet for my room lying there! He had been in correspondence with Standhartner about it, and now he sends off a telegram of thanks, signed “He and she.”
At lunch he sings a number of Viennese songs to the children, and over coffee we enjoy the carpet, which R. compares to a panther, saying it has the velvet sheen of a panther. He is gradually coming to appreciate my taste, he says: “Just a little while longer I shall go on wanting pretty colors and patterns, but when I am 70 I shall turn Siberian.” Then he says I should not give him presents at Christmas, and he wants to put off my birthday to coincide with his, which we will celebrate together; I willingly agree to this nice idea, but he takes it back, saying: “No, no, it’s foolish.” When I try to insist, he says, “One shouldn’t try to pin down every idea that flits through one’s mind.” Before our evening meal I discover him at his desk, beginning the third act in ink! Jesting at table, he says, “Children, behave yourselves: it is so easy, as you can see from me!” Talking about Fidi, he recalls the “foolish hanging of thy nether lip,” and he reads us Falstaff scenes.
He goes out for a while, returns, and says: “A spasm! If you can break its rhythm it goes away — that’s the way I used to stop hiccups, and it’s the way one can overcome all bad impulses, by just once not giving in to them.” Mozart again, and this time in connection with Beethoven’s “wirst mir alle Ruhe rauben”: he says Mozart did similar things much better. He also plays me the oboe entrance in Donna Anna’s aria: “Such melancholy sweetness!” “I am the last of the Mozartians,” he concludes his reflections.
Then chance leads him to Lessing, and he reads to me the conversation about John’s will and two of the replies to Goeze; much pleasure in their acuity and elegance: “What wit there is in such a brain!” says R.
When I return to him in the evening, after the first station of parting, he says as if to himself, “Noble spirit, thou gavest me everything,” and then continues to reflect on the relationship of God to the world, how difficult it is to describe; mortals always think of it historically, in terms of time and space, and what emerges is something external. When I observe that Goethe expressed it best of all, he says, “Yes, in Faust, Part Two; the curious form of that remarkable book makes it seem a kind of Gospel.” Then the foolishly hanging nether lip again: “How he sees these things!” he says. “Such a man comes once and never again.”