Sunday, December 1:
R. slept well and does some work. Over coffee after lunch he tells me: "When Parsifal is finished, I shall cast an eye over the world and see what its attitude is likely to be to such a work. But now I don't want to think of it." He complains how little attention is paid to a sense of beauty, "in which I regard myself as Mozart's successor" - for example, the way Brünnhilde talks of Siegmund to Wotan in Die Walküre. When I point out that the emotional feelings of the listener at this point prevent his having much regard for the consummate form: "That's what the works are for, they are there and can be studied."
R. stresses the fact that the Jews have been amalgamated with us at least 50 years too soon: "We must first be something ourselves. The damage now is frightful." "I wish a Byron would emerge among us, to describe and castigate our society! But he would have to be a prince, and, above all, immensely rich." Reflecting on Germany's inability to produce a Byron, he says, "Prince Pückler had something of the right qualities, he was elegant and irked by our wretched conditions, but he had no ideas to inspire him, no greatness." We then come to the conclusion that it was not the poet Byron who so impressed Goethe, but the man.
R. goes for a walk, as always now in the palace gardens, for which he has discovered a new measurement (five times lengthways), then he does some work. Our Friedel very full of fun at supper, demonstrates his geographical knowledge. Today we do not continue with Nap., instead R. reads me the conclusion of the "Walpurgis Night," the part in which Thales reappears with Homunculus; we are entranced by its humor: "This is the only way to deal with such things." The Euripidean Helena, however, does not much interest him - only the idea, not the execution. On the other hand, the scene between Proteus, Thales, and Homunculus, the "peevish" Nereus and the whole remarkable mixture of emotion and humor, send him off into joyous laughter and admiring exclamations. But we have to laugh at the idea of trying to depict all this on stage. When he is reading the passage with the sirens, he says, "Here comes Rossini!"
But after the reading R. looks very tired. R. amused us vastly during one of these evenings by admitting his interest in the novel in the Tagblatt - Alexa, a criminal case which excites his curiosity: "It is very poor," he says with a laugh.