Tuesday, November 19:
R. had a good night. When I return from my bath to breakfast, he tells me he has just been thinking that the French manner of being obliging to everybody (the shop assistants in the big stores are the type he has in mind) gives them the appearance of being slaves — quite different from the manners and habits of the English, for example. It reflects the attitude and services the ancient Romans demanded of their slaves.
R. did some work, but complained at lunch about his task: “I should like to be writing symphonies, in which I could write down ideas as they come into my mind, for I have no lack of ideas.” Over coffee he says to me, “I should return to the old symphonic form, one movement with an andante in the middle; since Beethoven one can no longer write symphonies in four movements, for they just look like imitations — if, for example, one were to write such extended scherzos.”
We discuss whether any inner connection exists among the movements of the Beethoven symphonies. “Yes and no,” says R., when I tell him I do not like to hear individual movements played out of context. “The connections would be loose ones, though of course Beethoven knew what he was doing when he added this movement rather than that; and the styles of the various periods also give the works a certain unity.” In the A Major Symphony R. says he can never help thinking of a Dionysian ceremony: “I could actually draw the pictures it arouses in me; but of course, if one were to do that, one would immediately see how widely one had diverged from the music, how alien these drawings would seem, even though the music inspired them.” He feels that Goethe attempted to do something similar in the Classical Walpurgis Night.
R. goes for a short walk, then works again and shows me his page: across his sketch, which concerns Kundry, is written a furious “bad” — “I thought it downright stupid” — and over it is then inscribed the approved alteration.
In the evening a very dismal drama, Phryne, leads R. to the subject of characters who talk endlessly in plays: “In Shakespeare, speech, however detailed, is always action.” He then goes through all the dramatists since Goethe and Schiller — a dismal review! Of Schlegel and Tieck he says, “They knew all about the theater, but they couldn’t write for it.” R. also blames Goethe to some extent for introducing this speechifying to the stage.
Herr Levi informs us very nicely of the coming performance in Munich, and Herr Viaresi informs us of the “triumph” of Tannhäuser in Trieste, with a request for a few words, which R. sends by telegram. “I am becoming too famous,” R. says with a laugh.
Various chapters in Lecky bring R. back again and again to the Roman church and the “scandal” of our present times’ being unable to cope with it. Then he says, “How can I possibly write for the Bayr. Bl. when out of consideration for the King and your father I am unable to state my opinion of the Catholic church, for example, and I ought to mention it in my projected article, ‘Shall We Hope?’ I can also say nothing more about the Jews (a contributor has asked whether he might attack Levi, which is hardly possible), or about musicians like Schumann, etc., whom frankly speaking I consider too insignificant. So I can say nothing at all, for the only value of my words lies in their unsparing truth, and this I can no longer express.”