Wednesday, December 11:
R. again had to get up once. All the same, he is cheerful and does not complain about these nightly disturbances. He goes for a walk in the morning, and this seems to do him good. As always much merriment at lunch! Of Fidi he says, “We two no longer pay any attention to each other, because we both crack jokes.”
R. remarks, “Fidi must have a tremendous itch in his brain.” And it is true, the dear boy has all kinds of nice ideas which I should much like to write down here, if I did not regard myself as being in the service of another.
When we let our Putz into the dining room and he dances around the table, R. remembers Robber in Boulogne who once, in his joy when R. encountered him, ran three times around the great square with the shops, like a mad thing, the huge creature looked so extraordinary! R. begins his “Retrospect” of the Bayreuth festival.
In the evening we tell friend Wolzogen our impressions of Busch’s book, the coarseness it reveals, and R. says that today he was in Angermann’s and saw such a handsome, distinguished, and candid-looking officer; he asked himself: “But what is it for? What use is made of such men? All the people at the top are such pitiful creatures.” He praises Turgenev’s book and says at times it really moved him.
Then he once again plays the Weber funeral music and speaks of the effect Weber had on him: “He was my begetter, it was he who aroused my passion for music. He revealed to me what wind instruments can do, for instance, the entrance of a clarinet, what an effect that can make. I wish someone could have seen me as a child when I watched Der Freischütz being performed in the small, old theater under Weber’s direction. It is a true blessing to have received in childhood such an impression of one of God’s chosen spirits.”
From here to Tristan; I had asked for the Prelude to Parsifal, but R. said he would prefer to play Tristan. He goes through the love scene and, when this is concluded, exclaims: “What extraordinary stuff it is! To imagine that as a repertory opera, it’s too absurd! It can never become popular.” I dispute this, saying that it was above all Tristan and Isolde which won him his true supporters, and that it is precisely this spun-out musical evocation of love which provides people with the magic they unconsciously seek in the theater. “Yes,” says R., “in a first-rate performance of it.”
Then he says: “This shows a pair of lovers aglow at the height of sin; they do not confess it to each other, but they feel there is only one escape, through death; first they ask each other, ‘How did it come about, when we loved each other from the start, that we parted?’ Then she does not wish to contemplate the death he has resolved on for them, until he persuades her, and both then find their highest happiness in this decision. Who can follow all that?”
I maintain that everyone who has ever been in love, even if it was a false or foolish love, must have felt the tragedy of love and of life, and will respond to the magic; he will feel increasingly liberated from his burdens, transformed by inner impressions which, slumbering inside him, now awake to enlighten him. R. laughs and says, “I must tell you what Meyerbeer replied to me when I expressed to him my feeling that the staging of the bathing girls’ scene in Les Huguenots did not match the music: ‘Maybe, Herr Wagner, but not everyone has as much imagination as you.’ ”
I say that Wotan’s sufferings are much less easily understandable, his farewell to Brünnhilde undoubtedly only made so for most people through the music. R. says I am quite right, and that is what he himself thought at first; also the music, even if he did take it to the utmost limits, always remains melodious. Later, when we are already upstairs, he says he had felt the urge to express himself symphonically for once, and that led to Tristan.