Saturday, February 1:
R. has slept well; he goes downstairs to work in ink while I arrange the “meadow” in his room upstairs. It turns out looking very Klingsor-ish, but that amuses him; he says, “Things are going so well for me - but that is because my previous life was so abominable.”
Lunch with the W.’s and friend Rubinstein, discussion of the state of affairs in France and Germany (R. says Bismarck’s name comes from “every bite [Bissen] a mark”!).
After lunch R. reads the Bayreuther Blätter with great enjoyment, then he talks about Das Liebesverbot and says he is surprised how bad it is: “What phases one goes through! It is hard to believe it is the same person.” He takes out [Rossini’s] Otello, the music in the second act as Rodrigo goes off and the following, plaintive aria of Desdemona, and talks of the impression it made on him, whereas Euryanthe always seemed stiff and false in spite of its heavenly music. Frau Schröder-Devrient always had to content herself with these Italian things, since she could make nothing of such Marschner nonsenses as “Leave me the veil, I beg.”
“Above all,” R. exclaims, “you need a good play, and the important thing is what one puts into a good play or takes from it; but that is the basis, and I always knew it - that’s why I could never understand Euryanthe.”
In the afternoon he reads the Bayreuther Blätter and is very pleased with W.’s article, “In the Coming Year.” “He is truly my expert,” he says, and wishes he had a musician like that, too. Memories of concerts.
Then R. says, “Nothing is so dear to me as the room in which I bide, for opposite, my fairest wife dwells there by my side.”
In the evening R. and I are alone, and as usual we then get immersed in our memories - “but nothing compared with their contentment.” We remember how we wept over Minna von Barnhelm at Tribschen and think with pleasure of all the many things we have achieved in these 14 years - Meistersinger, Nibelungen, the marches, the collected writings, Parsifal, the house, the theater, the biography.
R. reads to me two legends by Keller, the “Dance Legend” and “Virgin and Nun,” very pretty; but above all we like the short preface the author wrote for the book.