Tuesday, February 4:
“I have been awake since five o’clock,” R. says, “and I feel as if I were made of glass: I am quite conscious of all the functions going on in my body, though they are supposed to be working involuntarily.” He dreamed that he was again engaged in Dresden as a conductor and had undertaken in his contract to sing as well; he was expected to sing Max in Der Freischütz, and was indignant about this absurd clause in his contract: “Get Herr von Lüttichau to do it, I can’t sing a note.” Then he woke up. (Recently he told me of frequently recurring dreams in which he travels through Asia, finding Turkestan very different from what he supposed; he has also gone wandering through Africa.)
Then yesterday’s pitiful impression leads us to Beethoven’s symphonies, and R. remarks on Beethoven’s splendid instinct in avoiding all plaintiveness or other forms of excess; he departed from his usual rule only in the Ninth and in the first movement of the C Minor, full of defiance, but this is something quite different; these works depict Nature before the emergence of human life, he says: everything was struggle and destruction at that time, too, but in a different way. “I hate pathos,” he exclaims. “People will be amazed, when I publish my symphonies, to see how simple they are, though they have already had examples of that in the marches and the Idyll.” He tells me how Weinlig advised him against dissonances, saying they would either sound ugly or not be heard. “I shouldn’t have minded the ugliness so much perhaps,” says R., “but not being heard that annoyed me.” After lunch I stroll around in the garden, R. comes to fetch me, and I go with him into the palace gardens, where Marke’s curious way of chattering his teeth amuses him: “No doubt he thinks he’s talking!” I: “He sees us moving our jaws like that and does the same!” (This is what gave R. his dream a little while ago of Marke as an Italian chorus singer.) R. walks on farther; he does not care for the thaw, preferring the cold. On his return home he talks of a pretty theme for a symphony which he has downstairs: “It will all be done, the symphonies as well.” We part with thousandfold greetings and blessings.
In the evening the string quartet from Munich; at R.’s request they play Sgambati’s quintet together with Herr R.; it still pleases us very much, but it seems somewhat long and is the kind of music which does not raise one’s spirits.