Saturday, August 2:
R. had a good night and decides to have breakfast in the summerhouse. Friend Heckel is announced.
When I am in my bath, I hear R. laughing loudly, and he calls out to me, “It is decreed in God’s great plan that all that bores him most must every man go through again,” which makes us both laugh a lot; but though the verse occurred to him during Heckel’s visit, it does not apply to our friend, whom, in his capacity as theater director, R. sees as a Götz von Berlichingen, and who is a true German.
After R. has gone, I listen with the greatest pleasure to his description of the Ring performances in Mannheim, in which he once again displayed all his efficiency. I repeat it to R. at lunch, and he, too, is very pleased. Raust arrives; he has given me his old copy, which came from Minna and which contains his markings for the Faust Overture and the Ninth, and I lay an identical copy at his feet.
Over coffee, on the subject of Heckel, we talked about Germany, so difficult to understand. My sister, so talented, never to be won over to it at all, I myself won over by Tannhäuser, the prayer in Lohengrin. Regret that it had to be Hans through whom I came to R.; R. asks whether we would otherwise have discovered each other; he thinks that, if I had been with the Oliviers in Paris, that time in ’59, we should have got to know each other. But it all had to be won through blood! In the evening a drive to the Eremitage with Heckel, supper there, return by moonlight, everything dream, dream, dream - Nibelung figures and melodies flit past in moonbeams and linden-blossom perfumes, in the distance the plain and noble buildings.