Sunday, January 12:
R. slept well, woke up only once; in his first dream Marke sang an Italian chorus! The other dream was “creepy” again: “Minna was involved in it; she was supposed to return to me.”
Discussions about his attitude toward the patrons. R. says, “If it were not for Wolzogen, I should cancel the whole thing.” He works, but afterward does not feel well and decides not to go out - yesterday’s walk in a biting east wind did him no good, he says. Naples at lunch! Plans for next winter. Then he tells the children his dream about Marke, saying his chattering teeth were probably responsible for this Italian choral accompaniment of the sort one hears in theaters: a builder’s apprentice sang and Marke did the accompanying!
But I find it hard to be merry when he does not feel entirely well, when he is not, indeed, bursting with good spirits, and all day long I hear inside me Tristan’s “Wherever Tristan goes, is Isolde resolved to follow?” I hear it as I am reading the Odyssey to the children and accompanying Lusch to an afternoon party; it forms the melodic swell on which the poor bark of my existence is borne today. But when I return, R. is feeling and looking well. I find him at the piano, going through Médée, from which he plays me some very beautiful things.
In the evening he remembers that, having just read his article On the Overture, I wished to hear some of the things mentioned in it. He starts with The Water Carrier, and at one point remarks how pretty it is, how it expresses something of the pleasure one takes in a good deed. Then Les Huguenots, whose second theme is particularly delightful, and afterward Anacreon. R. says: “Cherubini was certainly the greatest of musical architects, a kind of Palladio, rather stiffly symmetrical, but so beautiful and so assured. All the rest - Auber, Berlioz - are unimaginable without him.” He also points out to us details in which the influence on Beethoven can be seen. We end with La Vestale by Spontini - “warmer in feeling,” “more passionate,” “less of a master”; he says the first finale in Lohengrin, with its continuous melody, could be traced back to Spontini “rather than to Weber.” Over coffee he gazes at the wall on which Beeth., Goethe, and Schiller are hanging and says, “There Makart ought to paint a fresco for us, illustrating the Dionysian element in the introduction to the A Major Symphony.” He literally divides up the wall for it and says, “Even if the painting should not please us particularly, or its connection with the present not be very apparent, we could still take pleasure in the idea.” He thinks that Genelli would have been able to do it. Like a monarch of all the arts he could assign each of them his tasks! He sang something from La Vestale, Julia’s lovely words following the departure of the High Priestess, and it did not tire him. R. remarks that not a single one of the people he mentioned (in his “Retrospect”) has had a word to say to him about it. The publisher Schmeitzner has sent copies of Nietzsche’s books to Bismarck, who used the occasion to admonish the publisher for using Latin lettering, recommending German lettering instead! R. says, “That’s just like that uneducated Pomeranian Junker, who does not even know what the good German J. Grimm had to say on the subject.”