Wednesday, November 26:
When I tell R. my impressions of the Prelude he says, 'It must be very difficult to write about music, for no one has ever talked, for example, about the new form of that Prelude; it is in fact a march with a trio, the theme of the trio appearing first of all in a whispered, fragmentary way before emerging in its full breadth.' What I find so wonderful is the soul in this theme, which so majestically reflects the stiff old forms; the spirit which preceded these old forms and met its death in them now brought back to life within them!
When R. fetches me for lunch, he sings to a melody from La Muette de Portici that they are bringing him the keys of Naples; and it does us good to think of these being handed over, so sad and gray is it here. And R. is still having to use 'the devil Nasias,' as he calls the steam cones.
He has been working through his score, and he says to me, 'Do you know to what theme Kundry and Parsifal meet each other?' He sings to me the passage in which the Knights rush toward Parsifal, saying it is similar to that used in the exchange of words between Kundry and P. in the first act.
Herr v. Stein has gone through his translation of Aeschylus's chorus with me, and since I find it very good and feel that our young friend has understood it properly, I talk about it to R., observing that it should turn out to be a fine piece of work. R. then speaks again about this wonderful poem, which contains everything that one can call religion. From there our conversation moves on to Dürer, and R. says in connection with the woodcuts (The Great Passion) that it is as if he had been literally playing with his subject - one of the soldiers in the crucifixion, for example, and the snoring people in the Ascension, could certainly make one think so. He agrees with me when I compare Maximilian's Prayer Book with Bach's 48 Preludes and Fugues. Moving on to Nürnberg, he says, 'It is all well and good, but it does not mean very much when one has seen the Italian cities.'
In the evening we read Don Quixote's speech about the value of military service, and all that follows, up to his being put in the cage. As R. closes the book, he says, 'That was, so to speak, the last artifice that was ever made.'
Before that he spoke regretfully of Goethe's life in Weimar - after Werther, Götz, the first draft of Faust, to make verses out of sleigh outings, Claudine von Villa Bella and things of that sort, then to go in search of classical form! It was fortunate that he returned to Faust. He prefaced these reflections with the remark that one cannot take pleasure in the life of any great man: 'Shakespeare is the only one for me - unable to put up with home, running away, writing plays, getting fed up with the theater, returning home, writing Othello and The Tempest, and dying.'
Putting the Cervantes book back in the library, he says, 'I wonder when we will take that out again?' In the afternoon R. played some themes from Beethoven's violin sonatas and found them not very significant; even in the Adagio of the Kreutzer Sonata he finds only the first part of the theme great and splendid, the second is thought up to fit.