Tuesday, March 11:
R. slept well, and we chat about all sorts of things at breakfast; of Christianity he says, “We lack even the rudiments of the education needed to understand such a phenomenon - we are in a state of complete barbarism.” It was the words of the requiem, which happened to fall into his hands, that evoked this remark; he pointed out to me how Jewish the words are. Our feelings of barbarism find an outlet in laughter when we contemplate “Die Wacht am Rhein,” a recently designed monument! R. works and goes for a walk in the afternoon.
In the evening Herr R. plays to us Bach’s B Minor Organ Fugue, the Prelude to which delights R.; he says that after such things one can scarcely listen to Mozart, who still has so many empty passages - only to Beethoven, for he also shunned empty passages, and we go through the C Minor Sonata. “How divine was this urge of Beethoven’s,” R. exclaims, “to pursue the simplicity of melody!” Then, regarding Bach, he says to me, “He was the culmination of the medieval world - Wolfram, the mystics, A. Dürer, Luther; after that a completely new world begins, the world of the sonata, the aria, which has also produced some fine things.” (Yesterday he praised Hans’s Nirwana very highly and recommended it to Rubinstein’s attention.)