Tuesday, December 10:
Not a very good night for R., he got up once, but he does not complain in the morning, wants to do some work, which worries me, but “I don’t deserve my happiness otherwise.”
At lunch he asks whether in his Faust Symphony Berlioz let the Walpurgis Night, the “gliding and gleaming” of the witches, escape him: “If so, he was very silly.” He says Romeo et Juliette is the work of a bungler, in spite of Berlioz’s great talent, and if “the stuttering Count” (Du Moulin) had put such a thing in front of him, he would have received a proper dressing down.
R. goes for a walk and says, “When I whistle for the dogs, they just say ‘Fiddlesticks.’ ” He recommends Turgenev’s Virgin Soil quite strongly to me, says it aroused very peculiar feelings in him because he himself had been through these revolutionary experiences, the lack of contact with the people.
“Then,” he says, “a genuine love, a happy marriage, who knows anything about that?... Young writers nowadays use their powers to denigrate what was formerly held in high regard, but they don’t know the reality.”
In the evening friend W. sends over an article in the National-Zeitung about the law against profiteers, very pretentious rubbish quoting Disraeli’s Tancred. Not worth bothering about. R. gives me great pleasure by playing his funeral music for Weber’s reburial; we then talk about this Weberian melody, its purity and chastity; every time I think of it, I see before my eyes a blossoming virgin, lovely in her modesty, whereas with Beethoven I receive no vision at all: he is just everywhere, like the great god Pan. R. agrees with me, saying it is like contrasting Shakespeare with Schiller.
R. loses himself in memories of this ceremony, “the most successful of my whole life.” After that we play the Idyll as a piano duet. We go upstairs in happy, indeed very cheerful, spirits, and when I tell R. I intend to send Glasenapp the stuffed pheasant, he says hardly does a malheur occur in Wahnfried but Glasenapp must be made a present of it, stuffed!