Tuesday, June 17:
R. had a good night, but he still cannot start on his cure, after which he intends to set about the Parsifal score, beginning with ruling the lines neatly and carefully: “I should like work on it to last until my 70th year, and then we would perform it.” He continues, “On the other hand, it would be nice if I could rely on Fidi sufficiently to leave the performance to him.” R. works on his article, but with some misgivings today; he says one achieves nothing by writing.
He is becoming more and more aware of the need for an end to the present era-it is only the worker, he feels, who now has a claim on life, as it were. Today he describes to the children (Lusch) the consequences of the emancipation of the Jews, how the middle classes have been pushed to the wall by it and the lower classes led into corruption. The Revolution destroyed feudalism, he says, but introduced Mammon in its place-oh, how comforting it is to turn one’s back on all that and just gaze at the trees! A blackbird, hopping before us on the grass, brings from R. the remark “Like Materna-birds with good voices are never particularly beautiful.”
Spent the evening with our two friends Wolzogen and Rubins., first of all reading Carlyle on Dumouriez and Danton. Our reading leads us to N. I, Nap. III, and others who, skillful strategists or statesmen though they might have been, nevertheless failed to face death squarely, and saw everything as a game of strategy. R. says: “These men lacked faith in themselves, and therefore greatness as well. Gustavus Adolphus was not afraid to die, and Frederick the Great always exposed his person to danger, but not these others.”
We go once more through the Fingal’s Cave Overture, which R. says is undoubtedly M[endelssohn]’s masterpiece. In the Midsummer Night’s Dream Overture he remarks on the gnats, and mentions Faust’s furs, from which the vermin fly when Mephisto beats them: “It’s like that.” “That is tremendously beautiful, ghostly,” he exclaims, pointing to a sustained progression of the oboes against the staccato of the other instruments (pages 25-26 in the score of the Hebrides Overture).
Then, to please me, he plays his Liebesmahl der Apostel; I asked him for it because I do not know the work, and he tells me I should not expect too much. By recalling to myself the occasion, and by visualizing the Frauenkirche, I come to the conclusion that the work, with all its theatrical, Catholic brilliance, must have given an appearance of pomp. R. laughs at the theatrical entrance of the Holy Ghost, and when I tell him my feelings he says, “Yes, it’s a sort of Oberammergau play.” Putting the music aside, he says, “There one is fully aware of the composer of Tristan und Isolde.”
He talks of the plagiarisms of his youth: only recently, when we played M.’s Calm Sea, he realized that this was his Columbus Overture! He also relates how he wrote his overture, in a room with Minna and Apel, and how-since he was jealous of Apel-he kept looking at them, to see whether they were not flirting too much! . . .