Thursday, April 3:
R. had a good night, but still this tightness in the chest; our breakfast is rather silent, since I still have no voice, but R. works. Herr Jäger calls at coffee-time and tells us about the great success of the final performances of Götterdämmerung, but says all other opera performances remained constantly empty.
R. laughs and says: “So Herr von Hülsen is quite right when he says I am ruining the theater - where the Ring is being performed people will go to see nothing else! Now the question remains how long they can hold out before performing it. I could bring audiences back for the old works, too, by producing them myself as they ought to be done.” R. contemplates the three younger children with delight, calls them love, loyalty, happiness, love, hope, faith!
At lunch he tells me about Carlyle’s Voltaire, which pleases him so much that he would like to send Carlyle something of his own. The fact that he is a theist hardly bothers him; he says this is what gives him his peculiar character. In the evening, on account of my throat, whist, and then, at my request, several pieces by Chopin, which R. enjoys, too. He counts him among the figures of the French Restoration. Then he points out several things in La Muette de Portici which especially please him, and he praises the work highly: “Such people I like; it is only our Germanic Nuppler whom I can’t bear.”