Friday, April 4:
R. got up once during the night, and I also disturbed him with my coughing, but he works and is satisfied with it. He says to me: “You do not even notice how I keep all my melodies in a certain style, so that it all looks the same but is in fact different. Just to string one melody to another, splish-splash - there’s no art in that.”
Over coffee he tells me about his plan for arranging some concerts here with the patrons’ money, spread over two months, with the aim of showing conductors how to interpret the classics. Is my reaction due to concern for his health (though I hardly think so, since what he wishes is good for him), or to fear of once more having closer contacts with the world and having again to concern myself with so many things I have put behind me? In any case the news hardly pleases me, and I betray my apprehension, but when R. says to me, “You would surely like to hear these things again,” my gratitude for his kindness makes up for the lack of pleasure I derive from undertakings of any sort.
R. returns from his walk and comes to sit with me: “The key to my music is the A-flat major from Tristan: Beethoven, Bach, and Mozart, well and good, but that is my music.” I observe that everything he has written is his. Spring was here, but then it disappeared again. The day before yesterday I was very touched to hear a blackbird singing, and it seemed particularly fluent since I was silent; if we hear more acutely when we are still, then death should make us all perceptive; I have a profound longing for it, and I welcome any indisposition as a messenger telling me that I shall not have to tarry long once my mission is fulfilled.
With these thoughts in my heart, my eyes met Loldi’s, and her melancholy gaze seemed to tell me that I should long be exiled here, to help bear the sufferings reflected in it. We play with the children, and then R. reads to me Carlyle’s Voltaire, excellent characterization, so just, so subtle. “For him, in all matters the first question is not what is true, but what is false” - R. finds this particularly excellent. Between game and reading we went through Annchen’s aria from Der Freischütz. R. says nothing more charming and graceful has ever been written, and he points in particular to the notations for rests in the oboe part, just before the words “Blicke hin und Blicke her” [“Glances here and glances there”], as if each glance were being depicted musically: “It is unique,” he exclaims, and he recalls his oboist Kummer - “a short, fat fellow he was, but what soul he had!”
He also remembers Julie Zucker, “with whom I was so much in love when I was seven years old,” and how at this point in the aria she would lift her apron, cover her face, and allow her eyes to wander. “The French and Italians have nothing like that,” he says, “however much they pride themselves on their gracefulness.” “Oh, we were also talented enough in that direction, we Germans.” R. wrote an autograph for the Spohr album. [Written on an enclosed loose sheet: “He sends the Holländer motive and beneath it something like: ‘In Kassel, where Spohr lived for years, / the Holländer found willing ears.’ He says he can now only write jocular verses.”]