Friday, January 3:
R. slept well, at any rate toward the end of the night. I sent up a grateful prayer when I heard him breathing in quiet slumber beside me after he had awakened in agitation from a nasty dream. We talk about music, and R. remarks how beautiful, indeed powerful, flutes can sometimes sound, in the Prelude to Parsifal, for instance. Then he comes back to the Calm Sea Overture and observes, “One might say that he had a good ear for landscape.”
When I say it seems to me that Weber led the way for him, and in Weber it all sounds so different, as if one were hearing the beating of a human heart, so to speak, he replies, “Oh, yes, undoubtedly.” He then reflects on Mendelssohn’s personality, says the same thing happened to him as to certain apes who, so gifted when young, become stupid as their strength increases. “I saw him (M.) after his marriage, and he looked so fat, so unpleasant, an unsavory fellow!” R. does a little work.
At lunch it is again Plutarch who fills our conversation with lovely glimpses of the ancient world. Over coffee R. tells me his dream, and I have to weep over it. We, the children and I, and particularly Lulu, threw him out of the house, and he had a kind of bad conscience, reacted in a cowardly way, and just said to Lulu, “If only you knew how unjust you are being!” R. laughs at my grief and says that whatever it is that is trying to wake him up always chooses the most horrible means.
Herr Rubinstein comes in the evening; R. has given him a task to do, and he speaks of the sculptural quality in Beethoven, saying this is the true sign of his work, even more than the rhythmical quality stressed by Weinlig; he tries to explain this quality to Herr R., and says with regard to the instrumentation, “It is quite superb in Beethoven, the groupings and so on, only now and again he misjudges the strength of various instruments, and if one tries to redress the balance a little one is doing him a service.”
Today, around noon, he comes up to my room singing, “My Parsifal will be good.”