Sunday, November 30:
As I am dozing off, I hear R. softly blessing me as he goes to sleep.... In the morning he tells me about a pamphlet, Anti-Stoecker, in which it is asserted that the Jews are so far from being a state within a state that they have even given up their own language. 'Fine fellows,' R. exclaims, 'losing their own language, when that is what a people preserves longest. It shows they are there mainly to live like parasites in the body of others.'
Then, when I speak of the Prelude yesterday, he says, 'Yes, I often have the feeling that, no matter how much I might leave out, it would still be the main thing.' I say that with the second note of its first bar one is already securely aware of being in the mainstream, whereas with the others everything seems still undetermined. What is schooling, what is tradition?
The Bayreuther Blätter has arrived, and R. expresses his full appreciation of Wolzogen as editor. Over coffee we come to speak of the application of a new law discovered by R. Mayer; Herr von Stein expresses the view that the application of it is of secondary importance, and one's pleasure in the discovery of a law is quite independent of it; R. replies: 'That shows you are still caught up in the struggle of the will. Incidentally,' he continues, 'the pleasure of which you speak is more or less the same as one has in art.'
R. goes for a walk and in the evening is looking very well, is extraordinarily cheerful. He soon overcomes his alarm over Eva, who has caught a cold and is very feverish, and at table tells us merrily of a journey from Leipzig to Halle which he made with his friend Apel and two girls, one the daughter of a ribbon maker, the other the daughter of a jeweler. Both had an eye on Apel, a rich young man who was a very good match, but they both found him, R., more entertaining; suddenly under the traveling rug his hand met Käthchen Westermann's (it took him a while to remember the name), and she pressed his. He felt very flattered and thought to himself, 'So that's all right - Apel won't get her.'
He says he was not vain, in fact he considered himself ugly, which he was. Just very exuberant, full of high spirits. 'That must come from my always going around with Philistines.' He turns with a laugh to Stein and Gersdorff: 'I beg your pardon, I don't mean now.'
After lunch he reads Herr v. Weber's letter to us. Then various things about recruits and the military life, the sober attitude the people have toward martial deeds. Finally he goes to the piano, starts with a few excerpts from the C-sharp Minor Quartet, then plays the beginning of the final movement of the Ninth, and ends with the andante. As he gets up, he exclaims, 'What that means - after constructing a whole passionate symphony, to make the double basses softly announce this theme, like something wrapped in cotton wool.' In the whole of art it is unique, he says: 'He heaps one thing on top of another, to give us at the end something like a glimpse into Paradise.'
Regarding the figurations in the andante, he says it is curious how many such figurations Beethoven wrote for the violin, and how variegated they are - he must surely have done some violin playing himself. When I quote various things from Jean Paul, R. says there must be some reason why he is so famous, and he recalls a few things in Siebenkäs which made an impression on him - for example, when the hero suddenly notices and dislikes the way his bride walks.
Regarding Siegfried's education he said to me yesterday, 'He doesn't have to learn anything at all, just grow up to be a decent fellow.'