Monday, January 13:
R. slept well, and he leaves me in cheerful mood to go to his work, after talking about La Vestale; among other things, he says: “It is a dramatic mistake, which I myself should never have allowed to happen, to leave Julia alone in the street to sing her aria. I should have thought of something, my imagination would have come to my aid. But as it is, all plausibility is lost, we are back in the opera house.” When the water in his bath becomes very hot, he is reminded of death, and he wonders what it would be like if one were treacherously to be scalded to death like that, how natural instinct would rise up in a scream of protest. I tell him I often ask myself whether one would not at once bow to the inevitable. He thinks not. He is well and does some work, which makes me feel as if I had wings! But how foolish is the assumption that possession robs love of its dreams - how much I think of him, how often I gaze upon his picture, how dominant the wahnlos hellbewusste Wunsch [“the undeceived sweetly conscious wish”] of his presence!
At lunch I tell him that I have finished the first volume [of his collected writings]. “Then I have at least one reader,” he says, and adds, “I must admit to being glad that even in my youth, urged on by my inner feelings, I always expressed myself in a simple and natural way, never just striving for effect.” About Opera and Drama he remarks, “It is a very curious work, and I was very excited when I wrote it, for it has no precedent in the history of art, and I was really pursuing a goal nobody had hitherto seen.” He is glad that Herr Musiol has so much respect for it. In the afternoon he goes for a walk and returns looking well, the dear, splendid man!
Visit from Herr Levi, very pleasant. To start with, R. goes through Beeth.’s F Major Symphony with him, pointing out to him the passages he would like to see somewhat differently orchestrated; he repeats his view that “nobody has ever grouped strings and woodwind more ideally than Beeth., but just here and there he failed to judge the sound relationships quite correctly.” He points out the sf. in the trio of the minuet, which Herr Rietz gave to the horns as well. Then he reads to us the translation of the libretto of Les Abencérages, and, later still, he plays us his third act, up to the worship of the spear. He declares that Gurnemanz (whom he wishes he had described as an armorer) is his favorite character - he and similar figures such as H[ans] Sachs, Kurwenal. Later he tells me it would have been better if we had done this when we were by ourselves - all the same, it was indescribable! Friend Levi stays behind after our other friends have gone, and when he tells us that his father is a rabbi, our conversation comes back to the Israelites - the feeling that they intervened too early in our cultural condition, that the human qualities the German character might have developed from within itself and then passed on to the Jewish character have been stunted by their premature interference in our affairs, before we have become fully aware of ourselves. The conductor speaks of a great movement against the Jews in all spheres of life; in Munich there are attempts to remove them from the town council. He hopes that in 20 years they will be extirpated root and branch, and the audience for the King will be another kind of public - we “know differently”! Alone together again, R. and I discuss the curious attachment individual Jews have for him; he says Wahnfried will soon turn into a synagogue!