Monday, March 3:
R. slept well. In the morning we talk a lot more about Der fliegende Holländer, which he intends to revise slightly. When I tell him how offended I feel if people prefer one of his works to any of the others - for the same great spirit is in all of them, and each is unique and incomparable in its own way - he observes that it must be a human characteristic to be exclusive and condescending with love.
Most people, he goes on, judge things by the amount of work in them: not the beauty of the picture, but the number of colors used in painting it. “If there were still any Germans left in the world,” he says, “Der Fl. Holländer would have been bound to make an impression, for it was something new in opera - but there are no Germans.” A picture in the Illustrierte Zeitung of an opera ball in Berlin vexes R. with its princes and Jews, Prussian epaulets and moustaches; the only thing in the picture which pleases him is a Chinese man.
We come to the subject of Schiller's Wallenstein, and R. says that if one excepts Shak., as one of course always must, Schiller is the greatest dramatist. When Herr Rub. expresses the view that the episode of Thekla and Max stands outside the main action, R. explains to him in what way they are a part of it, how the catastrophe comes about when Max, supported by Thekla, abandons Wallenstein. R. says it has now become the fashion to point out weaknesses in Schiller, though still professing great respect for him.
He is very pleased with the lines about Lessing in W. Marr's pamphlet, and he talks of Lessing's journey to Italy, observing that there he must have felt as R. himself does - melancholy, solitary, alien. R. is amused by the continued success of Das Rheingold in Cologne; he says it is probably due in the main to the machinist Brandt. Much conversation in the evening with Herr Rub. about his origin and the position of the Jews.