Friday, September 26:
R. had a good night, and when he extravagantly demonstrates his love for me, there arises in me such a longing to make him happy that I feel the stars should fall at his feet. But nothing happens, the skies remain overcast and gray, since the blazing is within, and day claims its rights.
Departure of the Spaniard, who declares he loves only the music of Beethoven and R. Wagner.
It is very cold; should we light the fires? But we remain indoors; R. visits me upstairs just as I am engaged in writing down the lines for the 27th, but I am able to conceal them from him. Then he calls me downstairs with the “Sailors’ Chorus” from Holländer. We discuss the distribution of his letter and decide to give it out as a supplement to the Bayreuther Blätter.
In the evening R. reads to us the article which he started but then broke off on account of the letter—what for Beethoven is a prerequisite is for Mozart a restriction—how fine! Then the first movement of the Ninth Symphony; at the return to the tremolo and the opening R. says, “That is the cauldron, the daemonic one which has been seething throughout, but one just didn’t hear it.”
I admit to R. that in this work I feel no need for a program, and I even put his, based on Faust, right out of my mind. R. says everyone conjures up his own images for it—but in my case not even that happens, and I can compare what goes on inside me only with the springing up of mysterious seeds and buds, the spirit being just a guide to the enchanted ground where this magical act of creation is taking place, its role merely that of a myrmidon, bereft of all power.
R. plays the adagio, breaking off after the first variation to exclaim: “That is an adagio—and what wealth of imaginative feeling in the variation! There is nothing like it.” When I mention Saint Cosmas, R. laughs and says there has never been a more typical Catholic than I am, and it is a wonder he ever managed to convert me.