Tuesday, April 29:
He was up once, at 4 o’clock, but he is not unwell; it is just, as he says, a curious feeling when a work like this has been completed. He goes through it in the morning and tells me at lunch that he has already made several pencil marks in it; several things were too abrupt, leaving the listener too much to fill in as far as music was concerned, and that could be put right.
When I tell him that I cannot help thinking of the middle part in the Faust Overture, he says it is strange how in one’s youth one does not dare let oneself go. Without this later middle part, he continues, the Faust Overture sounds so forbidding, and his symphony also lacks such sighs of relief. In connection with this youthful propensity, I tell him I am always asking myself why the writings of women, whether in prose or in verse, are so curiously dry. R. replies, “Because there is something artificial about a woman who writes; it is her nature either to love or to hate, whereas for a man writing is a natural means of expression.”
He goes out into the palace gardens, watches the military maneuvers, and says to Councillor Kraussold, with whom he is strolling up and down, “This is the way the Zulus now carry on, too.” Over coffee he said to me that in fact Siegfried ought to have turned into Parsifal and redeemed Wotan; he should have come upon Wotan instead of Amfortas in the course of his wanderings - but there was no antecedent for it, and so it would have to remain as it was. In the evening we read Carlyle’s Mirabeau with undiminished enjoyment. (“The triviality run distracted” - R. much amused by this way of describing the Revolution.)