Tuesday, September 30:
R. had a bad night. All the same, he manages to be cheerful, something which always astonishes me. He sings the song “The Storm Breaks Out” and laughs at its pedantic Germanity, something unknown in Goethe, for he never wrote empty phrases, even though he had a very good idea of what was German. He also sings the Queen of the Night’s aria and, thinking once more of the high-minded Tithonos, says, “Probably because he allowed Eos to leave him every day to strew roses.”
Since we got up very late, we do little in the morning; R. reads the play and describes it as somewhat green—how, for example, Alexander seats himself on Xerxes’s throne and the curtain falls!
Letter from Herr von Stein, announcing a visit; he wants to see whether he and Siegfried will get along together. Malwida the intermediary!
He plays bits from Tannhäuser, and we are pleased with the heroic character of the song to Venus.
I leave him to go shopping, and he intends to rest but does not succeed, and when I go to greet him around 6 o’clock, I have to disturb him while he is trying to sleep!
I leave him in a calm mood after a short chat over beer, and then have to endure the experience of Dr. Landgraf’s coming in and making a joking reply to some remark about vivisection, which puts him into such a rage that he himself is shocked by it. It all ends with mutual soothing remarks, but R. comes upstairs to tell me about it, and in the mood aroused in me by his account I lack the courage to “make myself beautiful” as usual for the evening; I sit on my spiral staircase and reflect, reflect, until the mildness of my thoughts lulls and calms me; and then from downstairs I hear music: R. is also dreaming, he in music, strangely melancholy but, like all music, soothing. And so the evening, too, is introduced in a conciliatory spirit, and R. softly praises music; later he plays to me the theme which he does not wish to be called a theme.
Friends W. and R. with us in the evening, further quartets from Op. 18; cold music, says R. [Added later: “I have noticed that the sonatas from the same opus are much freer and show much more feeling; is it that the artist, who played them, wrote them for himself, giving himself more than he gave the four people whom he liked to imagine as real musicians? Until it all melted together, and mastery gave him the ability to write down his most intimate thoughts for interpretation by others?”]
Discussion of Dingelstedt’s impressions, which appear under royal patronage, decorated with a Minerva: “Pallas Athena,” R. exclaims! And then there is mention of our young neighbor’s journey to Tunis, he says he is seeking there people of his own sort—Tu nichts [idlers].
He is pleased with the gate, which he points out to me from the spiral staircase; everything that comes from inside us is joy—but the world! ... “It is common,” he says with Hamlet, and we recall to ourselves this expression of disgust with the world, finding in it the best definition of those feelings which force one to remain inactive.