Friday, April 11:
To the sounds of R.’s music I go off to Communion with the children, my soul at peace. The raw winter wind blowing the blossoms about, the cold gray sky - these are indeed dismal, but in my heart the meadow blooms! . . .
R. does a little work; yesterday he told me he now has only one printed page of manuscript left to complete. At lunch he tells us that Bismarck is dissatisfied with the slow progress of the tariffs and is threatening to dissolve Parliament and hold new elections in order to make the deputies give way - “questions,” R. adds, “which cannot be considered carefully enough.” Then he talks about the Egyptian problem and how “whole countries are now being bartered on the stock exchange.”
At three o’clock to church again with the smaller children, I wished my profound wish and prayed, read Tauler. In the evening read Carlyle’s “Diderot” with R.; masterly description of the encyclopedist. R. writes to Herr Steinway to say that in no art form - neither in painting nor in architecture, scarcely even in music - has there been such perceptible progress as in the construction of pianofortes.
Of Beethoven it can be said that he never sat down to write unless he had an idea in mind, R. says; only the Fourth Symphony contains a lot of note spinning, it bears no relation to the 3rd and 5th symphonies; this can also be seen in some of the sonatas. I tell R. how lovely today’s service was in its great simplicity; I am now sustained by the blessings of his poem in everything, even in greeting acquaintances after the service, a task I previously found somewhat disturbing; now I think of the Knights of the Grail and their kiss of brotherhood at the end.
Yesterday R. wondered what the effect would be if after the service Parsifal and Gurnemanz were to remain alone together. Parsifal, completely dazed by what he, fresh from the woods, has just experienced; Gurnemanz, accustomed to it, simply eager to find out what he knows. This had struck him in the poem, even though it was all quite different there. I do not know what led him to the subject of the King and the buildings he is putting up (Versailles, etc.); he exclaims, “Oh, he is bad” (this obliterated in ink by an unknown hand), “and the falsehood of this life - to speak of the Trinity in connection with that!” We then seek to find out for ourselves from what point of view life would not be a falsehood, and we find it! . . .