Tuesday, December 23:
R. tells me his dreams: he saw Hans, curiously changed, pock-marked, but with a peculiarly serene expression, which made R. say to him, “You have now reached old age, Hans.” Then he, R., had inquired about Berlioz’s “Kaisermarsch,” in order to write a variation on it, but nobody knew it; then he tried to play his own. Also he had been taken to a large Jewish synodal meeting, at which two large Jews standing at the door had received him respectfully! Lusch plays Beethoven’s D Minor Sonata, and at one point R. says, “Those are the things, those runs, which say nothing and remind me of Rossini’s La gazza ladra.” Recently he said, regarding these runs, “Like Homer, Beethoven sometimes nodded.”
Fine weather, but we do not go out, since his nose is again hard and swollen; he puts on the sulfur amulet which old Frau v. Aufsess sent him and writes her a little verse of thanks. “The sun is sending down its counterfeit gold,” he says over coffee, gazing at the books. Our conversation (my quotation: “Sing, heigh-ho, unto the green holly: Most friendship is feigning, most loving mere folly”) leads us to Shakespeare’s play, and R. says, “That is the sort they are, princes in the forest as well as in their palaces, and they return home as if nothing had happened; they are just aristocrats, like Bassenheim in Lucerne, who also continued to eat from his silver dishes, unmoved.”
I observe that the great poet would not have concerned himself with such personalities if he had not at the same time brought in such figures as Jaques. We talked a lot at lunch about the scene in Cervantes we read yesterday; we mention Cervantes’s fate, taken prisoner in the victorious battle, then usurped by Lope, whom he could, however, admire (not like R. and Meyerbeer). R. says, “And for me one scene from Don Quixote is worth more than the whole of Lope.” The living Christian mythology in D. Q. leads us to the conclusion that among modern peoples only the Spaniards can speak of a genuine culture. “The sight of Cervantes!” R. exclaims. “As a young man I was always looking for such a sight—I would dearly have loved to see Shakespeare.” I know the sight he is looking for! . . .
Eva is still unwell. R. jokes with Loldi: “E. has acute rheumatism, you have suit-ruin-matism!” “Beethoven is the only true melody maker,” he stresses again today. “What Rossini gave the world in a vulgar way is already entirely there in him, in a noble form; everything in him is melos.” Visit from our friend Feustel, the first since his wife’s death. “He is a character,” R. says after he has gone, “and can be regarded as a true man of the people.” “Heavens alive, not to have our dear auntie with us any more!” R. says to him.
Recently, when I was talking to R. about Goethe’s life and return from Italy and mentioned Frau v. Stein’s 46 years (R. had previously maintained that I was not getting old), R. replied, “It was not because of the 46 years that G. did not cast yearning glances at her, but because Italy had intervened, and a relationship which had greatly enriched his youth revealed its stiffness - for it must have been a stiff one.” Summing up his impressions of Karl Ritter’s book, he says, “It is the dignity of ethics which so completely eludes these people.”