Friday, November 22:
"How did you sleep after your nightmarish day?" R. asks me in the morning, and says that he had to get up once. All the same, much merriment about amateur-concert muddles, Nürnberg experiences, Israelite bothers (R. said yesterday, "If ever I were to write again about the Jews, I should say I have nothing against them; it is just that they descended on us Germans too soon, we were not yet steady enough to absorb them").
He tells me his dream: that someone in his presence made an assassination attempt on N. III, but the dagger went wide, and when N. (who had a terribly long nose) started "butchering" children, he, R., "bolted." The recent attempt on the King of Italy's life probably put this into R.'s mind. R. has now finished Lecky, and on my recommendation begins my father's Chopin (published in French by Breitkopf und Härtel). But at lunch he tells me it must have been written by Vulpius (Princess Carolyne), and such descriptions (of simplicity, for example) and such a flowery style are repugnant to him.
At lunch he mentions Saint-Saens's Danse macabre and explains why this work is so trivial compared with similar compositions by my father and by Berlioz. Cheerful lunch; R. says to me afterward, "When I have finished Parsifal I intend to compose only what comes into my mind, no more according to plan; all I want is to live happily with you and the children, whose company means more to me than any other." He says he had wanted to call me in order to play something to me, but in the end had decided against it; he says I could never imagine the state he is in when he is working, how he enjoys fiddling about with a ribbon, a curtain, a coverlet - it is impossible for him to have a book nearby.
I now have two dancing lessons to supervise daily with the children, R. comes along in the afternoon and has fun with them; then he does some more work. At supper an Orsini-like bomb incident in Florence brings the conversation to princes, how they now seem to be becoming more and more superfluous in the eyes of the people, for "they consist of nothing but fear and cowardice; they send others to represent them, whereas one expects princes to appear in person, show initiative." Herr Rubinstein visits us in the evening; he recommends to us an Indian drama, Kise of the Moon of Intellect. When he remarks that in Indian literature it is very difficult to get to the root of the matter, I reply that with any subject one approaches one must in my opinion never lose sight of its relative nature, its position in time and space - nothing is absolute. R. agrees with me and talks of Christianity, in what a bad manner it was handed down to us: the Revelation is not bound to any law or any nationality, and yet it has come through.
Herr Ru. plays the American march to us, and does so quite splendidly, whereas the Idyll, which he did not study with R., continues to some extent to elude him. R. takes pleasure in the march and thinks that one day only the Americans will understand his meaning: "This is music of the future, too!" he says with a laugh and a sigh. Reminiscences of Tristan und Isolde in Berlin, the time of the Americans. A pleasant evening, though we are always left with a strange agitated feeling of exhaustion when other people come between us. When we are alone again upstairs, R. sings "froh wie seine Sonnen" from the Ninth Symphony and points out that at this point the tenor becomes nothing more than the accompaniment to the march, as if he were becoming absorbed into the procession. But, he says, only a great artist can grasp this and sing it accordingly: "Schnorr could have done it."