Thursday, April 17:
R. had a bad night, had to get up twice, and stayed up a long time. Whether it was the business vexations or the overcast sky, he goes so far as to talk of stomach cancer; I try to laugh, and am indeed confident in my heart, but what gloomy shadows oppress my mind! R. goes to his work.
For lunch Wolzogen and Feustel, over coffee discussion of the concert affair, R. finding it very difficult to retain his composure. Decision to place the application made to the Society of Patrons before the Cabinet secretariat, and to add a new clause to the contract. Friend Feustel seems to think that the King will either not live long or in any case not be sitting much longer on the throne.
R. goes for a walk in the palace gardens, then reads some articles by Feustel about the tariff question and writes him some words of praise, disagreeing only with his fears of France. When I come downstairs in the evening, he plays me a wonderful figuration and says, “That is for Wilhelmj!” Afterward he says, “I have closed the book today,” and when I reproach him for saying this in such an offhand way, he replies, “But I am by no means finished - the celebration will come when I give you the sketches.”
Rubinstein plays to us the fine B-flat major fugue, and after this R. asks for Beethoven’s A major Sonata, into which, as he says, he has dreamed many things. “That is like spring breezes,” he says, and then, “Hymettus’s yearning”; then: “Like heavy wings dipping.” During the trio of the march (which he likes to be taken rather heavily) he says, “It moves like a brook that has overflowed its banks.”
He describes it as a work written by its author for himself, to be played by himself; for example, the syncopations in the first movement cannot be heard, he would have them repeated in the bass. When Herr R. has finished playing, R. says, “He dedicated that to Countess Erdody - what a look she must have given him!” Herr R. did not play it quite as he likes it: “But where could one even begin?” says R.
When we withdraw upstairs, he talks about his Parsifal, saying it has not been possible to avoid a certain restriction of feeling; this does not mean that it is churchlike in tone, he says, indeed there is even a divine wildness in it, but such affecting emotions as in Tristan or even the Nibelungen would be entirely out of place. “You will see - diminished sevenths were just not possible!” I remind him that all his divine works are gloriously unique and different from one another. He can be pleased with them! . . .