Monday, November 18:
R. slept well. At breakfast we talk again about Saint Genevieve and the corrupt manner in which the modern poets have treated this story. Yesterday he took pleasure in the language of the Volksbücher, which, for all their Latin elegance, give a clear idea of the way the people told this story among themselves.
At lunch he says to me with a sigh that the work confronting him now is “too difficult — it is all so significant,” and he adds with a laugh, “Si jamais on m’y reprend” [“I hope nobody ever takes me up on it”]!
We go for a walk together in the palace gardens, where R.’s “strategy” enables us to walk for an hour without going twice along the same path.
Letter from Herr Jauner, begging pardon for the “cuts” and requesting a few lines, which R. writes in a very friendly tone, assuring him that 10 years ago nobody, including R. himself, would ever have dreamed of the possibility of Siegfried’s being performed in Vienna. As far as the cuts are concerned, he says — all right, as long as he does not have to make them or listen to them!
In the evening our friend Wok, who tells us that “Kar” is not a Hebrew, but an old German word meaning “care” or “lament,” which pleases us. R. told me late in the evening that Wok.’s future here was still exercising him: “I don’t yet see my way clear.” He himself would be best pleased if the theater were to burn to the ground and he would no longer have to bother his head about it all! However, W. has based his existence on the future of the idea, and this puts him under an obligation.
R. plays Beethoven’s F Major Symphony with Lusch and is indignant at the arrangers and publishers of these works; here, for instance, the sforzato, which in the trio is marked only in the accompanying voices, is placed above the leading voice as well; he tells us how in Dresden his tempo for this minuet movement at first upset the audience, then won it over completely, for it is precisely the nuance provided by this sf. in the trio which gives it individuality, and that cannot be brought out if it is played too fast. Before this he went through the final movement of the Ninth Symphony, and he regrets that my father did not take the liberty of giving the accompaniment to the voices, which Beethoven wrote for double basses, to the middle range, like the cellos, for that is how Beethoven had meant it, though he had written it otherwise: “I should not hesitate to do it,” he says.
We then talk about Schumann’s Genoveva. R. says that even the coarse laughter of the servants in it was taken from Auber’s Gustave III. This coarseness had once angered him in that work, too, but at least Auber had some excuse for it; here, however, when the Countess’s servants find their beloved mistress in such a condition and, instead of showing horror, laugh! But R. feels he would lay himself open to all sorts of misunderstandings if he were to give his real opinion of this work (he also mentions the ridiculous figure of the witch, who is meant to be daemonic). He says even the Society of Patrons is now too widely based for that.