Monday, February 17:
R. had a good night — at any rate he had to get up only once. Eva’s birthday; when we, R. and I, drink a toast, he says, “What we are drinking to is so touching that we cannot even mention it.” And, as always, “Things are better than they were.”
Then R. joyfully informs me that he has words enough — he had overlooked one verse (“der Hess sie so gedeihen”). He takes pride in not having had to alter his words: yesterday he recalled the melody of the “Prize Song,” which came to him before the words, and was pleased with it; today he recalls Sachs’s last speech and asks if any other composer could have done it better, as far as voice leading is concerned.
Referring to what he is doing now, he says he is taking care not to put in too many figurations — something he has sometimes done, as when Brünnhilde pleads to Wotan in Siegmund’s behalf; I remark that this was just because Frau Materna did not have the personality to act it — she was overshadowed by the music, as it were.
Recently he spoke of his absent-mindedness, the way his head is always full of his work, and he mentioned the example of Archimedes, whom the servants had to remove bodily from his work in order to bathe and anoint him, and how he continued to draw figures on his leg with the ointment; in the same way, he himself was constantly making notes on scraps of paper.
When we were talking about the dialogue between Odysseus and Circe, R. said that the fine thing about the Greeks was the way all these sagas continued to live in their thoughts; with us nothing now remains alive, and to this extent Keller’s experiment with legends is interesting and as it were folklike.
Delight in Fidi, whom R. always finds so beautiful when he compares him with other boys — as if from a different world. (Fidi brought me the first flowers of the year; on the very day of Eva’s birth — she herself one of life’s blossoms!)
R. goes out for a while and drops in at Angermann’s, where he causes ringing laughter by telling the barmaid, who is leaving, that she ought to offer her services to the theater committee in behalf of the ballet! (A committee to promote the theater has been formed here.)
In the evening the three younger children gather around a little table to play cards; they make a very amusing picture, and R. says, “Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger, and Siegfried — I myself am Götterdämmerung!” Then: “The three lansquenets.” It gives him the urge to play, too, and with Miss Murchison we make up a whist table with “bids”! ...