Sunday, November 17:
I was concerned that R., disturbed by our wallowing in reminiscences of happiness and suffering, might not sleep well, but my blessings did not abandon me; he slept peacefully and well, bathed with Fidi, and at breakfast is well and cheerful. He comes to lunch late, held up by his work.
He tells me that he has just composed “Kar-Freitag” [Good Friday], which he has accented differently from its usual form: “It ought in fact to be ‘Klag-Freitag’ [‘mourning Friday’].” I beg him to call it so. He: “It’s not a good thing to put oneself forward simultaneously as a poet and a philologist — that would draw attention to it.” I ask him whether he cannot let Gurnemanz say “Klag-Freitag” at the first mention, then subsequently “Es ist Karfreitags-Zauber” [“That is Good Friday’s wonder”]. He agrees.
A letter from the lawyer in Dresden vexes him, for a proposal which R. himself is now unwilling to accept has been turned down by the King.
In the evening R. plays the Eroica (1st movement) with Lusch, then our conversation leads us by chance to the legend of Genevieve of Brabant. (Loldi read something about Marie Antoinette, and R. was reminded of his sisters, Ottilie and Klara, how they had wept over the story of Genevieve and sworn to each other that they were not weeping.) We wonder about the ending, and I first of all read aloud (from Simrock) the last version, then the one before this. I am unutterably moved by it, and when my tears interrupt my reading, R. says, “The ancient world knew nothing like this.”
We deplore the additions attributable to the monk’s imagination, such as the crucifix in the sky, etc., and come to the corrupt imagination of the modern writers (Tieck, Hebbel, Schumann), who turn Golo into an “interesting” character, whereas he is quite simply a monster! When R. tells me the story of a female saint who swore an oath of chastity with her husband and spoke smilingly to him in death, I tell him that it is the human saints who touch me, those who turned their backs on life because of some terrible experience, and not those who never lived at all; I contrast his Elisabeth with Genevieve.
This day, too, ends in tears of emotion and love. “Everything comes together in you,” R. says to me, and I lay at his feet everything that moves my soul, for he is my salvation, my shield, my support!