Thursday, January 30:
R. had a tolerable night, he got up only once, after dreaming that I was startled by a noise; he went to see what it was, and as he went I called after him, “Don’t leave me!”; whereupon he: “I shall be back at once.”
Waking up, he goes to his room, reads Plutarch, and finds nothing but ghosts in it, then finally the cave of Trophonios. He says, “Devil take it!,” shuts the book, and returns to bed.
All this I find uncanny, for I am debating in my mind whether I shall not, in order to keep up the surprise, have to go to Munich to have my portrait painted for his birthday!
R. works and tells me a canon is going around in his head, and he really does seem preoccupied. Over coffee he tells me that his greatest happiness, “which you share with me,” lies in creating, in the way it sometimes comes to him in various ecstatic moments. But one must take care then, he adds, not to do too much.
R. goes out, as always these days, just into the palace gardens, which are now completely bound up with Parsifal. News of Kienzl in London.
In the evening we continued with Le nozze di Figaro to the end; great delight in almost all of it. R. points out to us how, in the Count’s aria, the nobleman’s sinister contempt for the common people is expressed; then the lovely instrumentation of various entrances - the bassoon, for example, in Susanna’s “Deh vieni” aria, and the flutes in the introduction to the Count’s aria; then the splendid basses at the end, the incomparable dance, which is so characteristic, for that is what they are really like; we heard such things in Naples.
In the morning he thought of his sister Klara, how beautifully she had sung the Page [Cherubino].
When I betray symptoms of a severe cold, most unusual for me, R. recalls Socrates’s daemon, which also announced its presence through sneezes, and he reminds me of the story, which I was recently told, of the wise man who turned back halfway!