Saturday, March 1:
R. had a better night, got up only once, right at the beginning, but went to sleep again immediately. I dream for the second time that I have no flowers for his birthday - the first time the roses had not yet begun to bloom.
In the morning R. tells me that he considers it very important for everything to sound well, including the subsidiary voices, and that is why he likes to have a piano at hand; he is not satisfied until it all sounds right. In Beethoven there are frequently passages which sound “squeezed,” making R. say to himself: “S----- (I), if he had listened to it, he would never have written it down.”
“Stay just as you are,” he exclaims to me, “don't take anything away, and I want nothing added” - he is speaking about life. He works, and around lunchtime he fetches me and sings to me, “Du weinest, sieh, es lacht die Aue” ... Bright and sunny weather. The children are well, but at times my impressions seem to overwhelm me; after lunch I have to lie down. I come around only very gradually and write to E. Nietzsche about her brother's book.
In the evening we read the pamphlet The Victory of Judaism (in which R. very much likes the comparison between Bismarck and Constantine) - it makes me feel very melancholy! After that, we read with great enjoyment the two scenes between the student and Mephisto in Parts One and Two of Faust. We also go through some songs by R. Franz - “Du bist elend” and “Ich grolle nicht,” which Franz once asked R. to sing to him. R. enjoys the songs, and some by Schubert which we mention he finds “unutterably beautiful” (“Sei mir gegrüsst,” among others); he says that was Vienna as it used to be, the Vienna in which Beethoven lived, and an ardent, naive fellow such as Schubert was living under its influence. And then there were Strauss and Raimund as well. Now all that is gone.