Sunday, October 5:
After a good night R. gaily looks through my fashion journal in bed; he is always interested in costumes, but unfortunately we cannot help finding everything incomprehensibly ugly. Strange boys at lunch, Latin scholars, and we hear about the questions set for them in examinations, which greatly shock us: to know the ABCs so completely by heart that one can say with the greatest rapidity which letters come before and after this or that one!
Then Schiller's poem Der Alpenjäger to be written down in prose, thus depriving the child from the very start of the divine element within it, the "thus it must be"! In the evening Herr Jager sings something from Die Walküre; at the passage in which Sieglinde relates how Wotan appeared, R. turns to me and says he is pleased with it - it is like something from an old legend, something long since past, even for Sieglinde herself.
Earlier several things arrived from Straubing, where the animal protection society has put up a very good show, and since Herr Mottl, who has just arrived here from Vienna, is composing a Romance in A minor, R. gives him a pamphlet with a joking dedication.
Added three pages later: "On Sunday he wrote to Frau Lucca, saying she should seek out a respectable tenor, and he would then produce Tristan in Italian."