Saturday, September 6:
R. slept well and is cheerful. We have been rewarded with lovely autumn days. Our conversation leads us from the military character in general to Cromwell, the Lord Protector. This naive title, which R. also chose for his Lohengrin, leads R. to reflect on the character of this “gigantic” human being, his enormous understanding, his relatively less developed powers of reasoning, a man in whom everything taken to be hypocrisy and dissimulation was in fact naiveté; he could not express himself in any other way.
R. also talks about Charles II, who with his black wig was particularly repulsive to him. R. does some orchestration, and again jokingly remarks how slowly this progresses now and how quickly it went last year. His eyes are somewhat strained; he works in my room, where the light is better. Over coffee a discussion with friend Wolzogen about his task for the next issue of the Bayr. Blätter.
In the evening R. reads several scenes from Romeo and Juliet - there is nothing one can say about it, and time and time again one feels the need to express one’s astonishment. Everything, the most delicate as well as the most vulgar, he saw and vividly portrayed - the latter, as R. says, apprehended but not reprehended! R. also reads the scene in Coriolanus at the house of Aufidius and points out to us how the conversation among the servingmen, besides being witty and original, is dramatically important, telling us in the most economical way what we need to know.
(Yesterday R. wrote to Herr Jauner, who has requested him to attend the performances, asking how he could possibly believe he would ever again set foot in Vienna.)