Wednesday, January 29:
R. slept well, and he works; at lunch he tells me that he has sketched Kundry’s baptism, and he hopes I shall be satisfied with it. We go for a walk together in the palace gardens but soon return home, since I feel the air is too keen. R. does some more work, and I get the impression that he has had a slight rush of blood to his head.
When Herr R. comes, I go through Parsifal (Act II) with him, while R. watches us and listens. Apart from a few deficiencies of tempo and execution, we are astounded by the way Herr R. plays from the sketches. But after he has played Parsifal’s cry following the kiss, R. springs to his feet and sings this passage, in a way the world will never hear again!
Reports about Rheingold in Cologne (rehearsal) make me think of the remark he made yesterday (at the “banquet”), pointing to the statuettes: “Those are my sons, they look after me, I do not concern myself with them.”
Before we start on Parsifal, R. glanced at Beethoven’s C-sharp Minor Quartet and pointed to the 3rd bar in the second line; he says he finds it unpleasant, it does not sound well, altogether he finds the whole movement distasteful; when Bach does similar things, it is quite a different matter.