Thursday, March 20:
The night was restless to start with, but later on it was all right. When I come from my bath, R. sings, “If a man will not let you sleep,” and moves on to the words of Die Schweizerfamilie.
At lunch a toast to Boni, whom R. addresses and congratulates with all his deep sincerity, recalling my sister, my feelings for her, the meeting in Reichenhall at which R. was present. He says he was also yearning, seeking someone to whom he could yield utterly and say, “Come with me, to Hell with everything else!” “But I always found everything—all the tables—already booked!”
[Added in margin: “Yesterday, in connection with the scarlet fever, he thought of Friederike Meyer, who behaved toward him ‘with very great nobility.’ ”] Before that he recalls his visit to Berlin shortly after Boni’s birth, when he proposed a drive, which I accepted: “You were always smiling beneath your tears,” he tells me in a touching voice, then adds gaily, “Very interesting!”
R. goes for a long walk (as far as the Students’ Wood) but returns home not entirely content; he has a great longing for the South. Impressions from the outside world are also not calculated to raise one’s spirits, and in connection with the Szegedin catastrophe he says bitterly, “It does not go far enough for me—something terrible is needed to bring people to their senses, to make them think seriously.” In the evening he reads to me passages from Plutarch about religion (in the conversation about Epicurus), and we have to admire this author’s fine way of saying the right things, and with what noble reason, as R. points out, he steers a path between the utilitarianism the English employ to protect religion and the ferocity which destroys it. We are particularly pleased with the sentence “Few fear God, so that it would be better for them not to fear him,” and what comes after that.
At lunch R. said that he would allow himself plenty of time to complete Parsifal, this final realization of a series of images which had arisen in his mind. He says he does not believe he will presume to create anything more that is new; the symphonies are different, but he wants to complete everything in peace and contentment. Before supper he comes up to my room, talks to me about the “elegy,” and says he would like to play it to me; and he does so—this unique elegy, the process within Parsifal’s soul when he becomes once again “an ordinary mortal” before he becomes a king. . . . “You have no idea of all the things in it,” he says. I: “I believe I have.” He: “Yes, of course.” Before that he said he could not understand how they did it, those composers who wrote one thing quickly after another, like Raff and Rubinstein “and others as well.” “But their work shows it.”