Friday, April 9:
R. slept well, but I am worried, because yesterday his voice sounded so tired. Today, however, he seems somewhat better, and he summons me for the most moving dictation, November 28!
This mood dominates our day, impossible for me to think of anything else. We take the streetcar into town, very merry, and go for a walk in the Villa Nazionale, where everything pleases R. except individual faces in which one can read a horrible and sinister brutality and no good nature of any kind. The streetcar is full, we hire a carrozzella; R. is afraid of catching cold, jumps out of the moving carrozzella, and walks home on foot; I drive Boni home, then walk to meet him, and we return home together in peaceful harmony.
In the evening much about Gladstone, who has won Midlothian. A great deal, too, about Lohengrin in Rome, photographs, enclosures, expressions of gratitude, etc. [Inserted in the Diaries a telegram in Italian from all the participants? ...] Then whist. R. wishes not to do any more dictating, but to settle down to some work. He wants to put off the dictation until after the production of Parsifal, when he wants also to take Siegfried’s education in hand and revise Der fliegende Holländer.