Monday, March 24:
R. had a good night; letters about Naples and the Villa d’Angri are becoming somewhat problematic. R. works. He also attempts a walk, but the weather is so raw he is very upset and vexed by it. The Steinway grand piano returns to us equipped with a “pulsator” and delights us with its splendid tone. It is christened with the strains of Parsifal; a merry episode in the evening as we search for the name of the English composer Wallace and, after constantly renewed searches, at last find it.
R. showed us the picture of the Zulu King and thought of Wallace among the cannibals (Berlioz’s Soirées d’orchestre). He says Wallace was a Wagnerian.
When I talked of Frau v. Hülsen, saying that in the final act of Tristan und Isolde she was reminded of “the pretty evening star,” R. says the trouble is that people can never call things by their proper names, and that is what matters. The princes, for example, such as the Grand Duke of Baden, who had held out hopes to him of grandiose schemes which never came to anything—he could not mention their names without employing the language of the gutter; but mere hints were not enough, one must name names—Lasker, for example, once reduced Roon to complete silence by mentioning names, though in that case Lasker was playing a treacherous game.
From Parsifal: the consecration of the King and the meadow, then R. looks for his new sketches and plays to us the responses up to Amfortas’s first outburst. He feels that his interpretations from the penciled sketches cannot have made things clear to us, but when I go to him upstairs, as he is putting the pages away, I tell him what a wonderful picture they had conjured up, how lifeless these singing and marching knights seemed, the whole thing working on one like a ghostly parade, until the tender and sorrowful laments of Amfortas enter suddenly like a living experience and move one profoundly. R. observes that I am the only person who could get such clear impressions from these “muddled pages”—ah, it is the inspiration of being permitted to follow him that gives me the power to do it! . . . [Added below: “R. tells Herr Rub. that the art lay in playing the seconds in the bass heavily, like the very footsteps of the knights bearing the casket.”]