Friday, March 14:
R. slept well, does some work, and is satisfied with it. Toward evening I hear him playing Tristan, and when I go down, he says, “I wanted to entice you down; if you only knew how I talk to myself and tell myself how happy I now am!”
As we sit down to supper he says, “You, children, are a part of our happiness” - with that radiant kindness so unique to him. Then he laughs. “So you can see how creative work and life belong together: in former days I wrote Tristan, now I am writing funeral music,” he exclaims. “Poets alone he understands, who once has lived in poets’ lands.” When Herr R. comes in the evening, we go through Tristan, Act 3, from the curse on love to Isolde’s death, to the end, and I feel as if I could never stop, were I to begin to say what this work reveals to me! ... R. tells me that for him the loveliest moment is when the theme enters three times with muted horns and violins, as Isolde’s only response to the sympathy of the others.