Thursday, November 28:
Smiling meadows! ... R. thinks of them with delight and looks back over the years; I think there were fifteen, but he: "No, I am reckoning from 1857 - we could soon have been celebrating our silver wedding anniversary!" I: "And been spared much misery and suffering." "Yes, my God! But who ever asks me? People build theaters without asking me, they get married without asking me!" he exclaims in a jokingly grumbling manner. "My meeting with you on November 28, 1863, was the expression of my weariness with the world." The "smiling meadow" I have spread across his piano pleases him, and at lunchtime he calls me and shows me his room, saying my portrait now rises up like a lotus flower from a pond. "I have also written something good," he says, "not much, but good."
What delight there is in decorating the home of his ideals a little in accordance with his inclinations! He must be able to immerse himself completely in his dreams there; recently he said he must not be able to see the garden paths, which lead outward - that is too definite, it disturbs concentration. In Tribschen his windows overlooked the mountains, and that was not quite the same thing. A lovely, mild, glorious day, the sun shining. I go for a long walk, R. comes with the dogs to meet me and conduct me home. He does some work. Over supper he recalls the former glory of Nürnberg, with its 100,000 inhabitants ("no town should have more"), and its present state, also the ravages left behind by the Thirty Years' War.
After supper Disraeli, the appearance of the angel on Mount Sinai: "No doubt Disraeli is now ashamed of this book." He also laughs at the way God's appearance on Sinai is regarded as such a positive thing. During our reading we skip all the fictional parts in order to confine ourselves to the message. ("For that can't be taken lightly, he is the Prime Minister of England and has the whole Eastern world in his pocket." During our walk R. said, "I find it embarrassing to keep coming back to the subject of the Jews, but one can't avoid it when one is thinking of the future.")
The Faust Overture, which R. plays with Josef Rubinstein as a piano duet. They then talk about his symphony, with which he is pleased; he says it is perhaps not uninteresting to observe in it what effect the works of Beethoven, at that time still inaccurately known, had on a young man. "I also enjoyed putting my contrapuntal studies to some use - there are some strettos in it, real diabolical stuff." He also talks about his uncompleted symphony in E major, saying that, as far as he knew, nobody had yet written a symphony in E. At supper he praised Mendelssohn's Calm Sea and Prosperous Voyage: "In general he had a good sense of the orchestra." After playing the Faust Overture, he talks about execution, saying that nobody nowadays knows how to play a mordent, whether it is there to introduce the following note or intended to replace this note. Then about singers' breathing. Example: [Amalie] Materna ("the good creature, she learned it from me") - he quotes the passage in Die Walküre ("Der mir ins Herz diese Liebe gehaucht") which she sang in a single breath, whereas Hill, despite R., who sang it to him, took a new breath at each of the places indicated in the following by a stroke: "Wie j aus der Feme / Iangst vergangner Zeiten / spricht dieses / Madchens / Bild zu mir." R. recalls having told Frau Dustmann how she should breathe in Donna Anna's aria, that is to say, he told her she should sing the bar leading up to the recapitulation of the theme and the theme itself in a single breath. He goes through this aria, delighting once more in both it and the accompaniment of the two oboes. R. reveals his opinion that everything in Mozart is song by exclaiming, "The whole Andante of the C Major Symphony is an aria - I should like to put words to it and find a voice like Catalani's to sing it." To end the evening R. plays his prelude to the third act and Gurnemanz's words up to the awakening of Kundry. Later, when we are alone, our whole being becomes immersed in love, and R., crowning mine with his, cries, "What are words to us?" Deep in my heart I feel the unutterable mystery of the blessings bestowed on us...