Monday, December 20:
Wretched nights still, because of either the Föhn or melancholy feelings. I should never have regained my sleep if I had left R. to his dreary and disconsolate fate, that is certain; and now it is the thought of Hans’s lonely existence which robs me of my rest. But I do not complain, for I feel this is as it should be.
If only, my children, I could instill my knowledge into your souls, enabling you to renounce all happiness here below without personal experience, consequently cheerfully and sinlessly! “Let him who calls no soul his own steal away from our bond” came into my mind while I was thinking of R. Loulou, my child, assume the task of living for your father, to compensate him for all he has lost!
I felt peculiarly sad when I heard Loulou reflecting in the evening that she would like to marry and have children.
The Illustrirte Zeitung publishes a portrait of Beethoven in the year 1805; it is very unattractive, bloated, almost devoid of intellectual expression. “Well, musicians must be ugly in appearance; in them the heart is everything. As a woman becomes clairvoyant through her nervous system, so a musician does through his heart, which does indeed have a mind of its own. The musician does not see people, their movements, and their actions; for him everything is tempo, structure, etc.”
He continues writing his essay and reads me what he has written. Afterward we discuss how Knecht Ruprecht should look. Then with him into town. Sent the student home; news that Eduard Devrient has been suddenly dismissed. For what reason? Have R.’s words perhaps had an indirect influence on the Grand Duke?
In the evening, looking at Fidi, R. says he has the glittering eyes of the Wälsungen; that brings us on to the Edda, then to Götterdämmerung. He shows me some lines in his composition notebook which Brünnhilde should sing in place of “Selig in Leid und Lust” and in which the chorus should join; the burning of Siegfried’s body to be done as a sort of ritual. But he has abandoned it, rightly, as not being stylistically in keeping with the whole. “Such things as final choruses have no place in this work.”
In the evening much enjoyment with Tristram Shandy.
Tuesday, December 21:
Gift troubles; can giving pleasure to others make up for the distress of having been the cause of suffering? Certainly it does not, yet the pleasure remains great and pure. In the night I thought of an idea for a comedy, of which I worked out the whole first act.
Afternoon outing with R. In the evening a letter from Judith, reporting that after a bad first performance of Die Meistersinger there was a great demonstration of hostility, whereupon a young man in great excitement pressed into her hand some pretty verses about R. Pasdeloup proudly and boldly repeated the Overture on the following Sunday, and a veritable storm of enthusiasm (vive Wagner) is said to have broken out.
R. works on his essay. In the evening Tristram Shandy.