Saturday, April 12:
R. is pleased with the return to normal routine; he says it had been a veritable flood of holiness. At breakfast he tells me how yesterday he imagined the Crucifixion to himself - “not possible in our climate, the wounds need the hot rays of the sun”; he pictured in his mind the languishing, then the cry, and he felt very moved.
He explains that it was not Christ’s death but his resurrection which gave rise to the religion; the death all but destroyed the poor disciples, but the women’s not finding the body in the morning, and seeing Christ in their exaltation, created the community: “In the disappearance of the corpse a strange and subtle fate was at work.” He quotes Renan, who sees the foundation of Christianity in a woman’s love.
R. works; after lunch he speaks to me about the strange compulsion exerted by a poetic conception, which restricts all one’s freedom, and he says one cannot create many such dramatic works, or work on other things at the same time. He recalls the ending of Tannhäuser, saying, “It is good that Elisabeth dies just as the pilgrims are returning.” “Children,” he says at lunch, “you see what a man looks like who is writing his last opera.”
Goethe once said that it made a great difference whether one was born ten years earlier or ten years later, R. continues, and he can say of himself that he arrived either ten years too early or ten years too late - actually too late, for he should have stood in the same relationship to Beethoven as Schubert did, and then he would also have been in touch with people like Carlyle and Schopenhauer; in music he had known Weber, but no writers or poets. The weather is very bad, snow, rain, cold, and a constantly gray sky! Just as I am writing this, R. comes in with the children, bearing whole masses of flowers which the King has sent, along with some beautiful and apt words. R. replies by telegram (for poem see red file). In the evening finished “Diderot,” much delight in it.