Sunday, February 2:
R. had a good night, and he works (from pencil to ink), he says his canon will surprise me.
At breakfast he suddenly calls Bismarck the great tax collector, since he is trying to put taxes on everything. After lunch we are amused by the sudden idea of calling R.’s previous life, in memory of G. Keller, the Faldtsche, which consists in nothing but detritus. Before that R. said to me, “You are right, the King does belong to us; he has caused us a lot of trouble, but from the point of view of Fate, he does belong to us.” The same thought I encountered again, in his Braunes Buch, which I glanced through during the decorating, and where it is written down!
Yesterday, when many thoughts, both large and small, were going through my head, they found their expression as we parted after lunch in “Laughing death!” “Not at all,” said R., “weeping life!,” and today he asks me what I had in fact meant by it: did I wish to die?!
In the evening some more of the Preludes and Fugues, five of them today; the 4th (no. 12 in the second book) R. calls a complete transition to more modern music. He says Bach must have played it to his wife. Previously he had emphasized the extent to which these works were written by their composers for themselves, and how superficial the works their successors wrote for other people seemed in comparison - the sonatas. “They have also given us some good things, of course, but this is like birth itself.”
He then goes on to point out the difference between Bach and the Italian composers of the same period, talks of a figured “Kyrie eleison” and tells us how as children he and his sisters imagined they were singing fugues when they sang these figurations to themselves.
Candlemas brought us glorious sunshine, and R. went out twice today.