Tuesday, November 4:
R. did not get up at all during the night, which is always a triumph, and I also hear him laughing loudly as I go to my bath. He then tells me he has been thinking of that sentence in Falstaff's speech to the Prince, when he says he would not believe him to be his son if it were not for a certain feature of his nether lip.
He goes to work on his article, and when I ask him not to overstrain himself, he says, “Oh, no,” adding that when he just sits and reads he gets melancholy in the evening. He has been much occupied in the past few days with Grétry's Raoul Barbe-Bleue, and tells me again about Raoul's white plume, which as a child he wanted so badly. Then he shows me the score, the instrumentation so empty - what a difference when one compares it with La Dame Blanche, he says! I tell him there is a difference also between his scores and Weber's. He says, “If one were faced with doing what Weber did, one couldn't do it a single jot better.”
Alarming rumors regarding Frau Feustel's health induce us to address an inquiry to Dr. Landgraf; he sends us a short bulletin, so careful and precise that R. breaks out in praise of our good doctor, who has now, he says, replaced the parson. Enclosed here is a note diagnosing Frau Feustel's complaint as “a typhoid type of illness with high temperature.”
Whist with the children and a start on the story Kleider machen Leute. R. sings the finale of Beethoven's E-flat major sonata, one of the early works, and says, “This kind of melody has gone forever - innocent sweetness, it is a lost paradise.” Hans has resigned his conducting position in Hanover following a dispute with the tenor Herr Schott. So once again homeless! ...