Thursday, April 15:
R. goes for a walk in the morning, notices the flowers which open during the day and then close up again, and tells me about everything he has seen. Regarding our friend Rubinstein, he says he cherishes a firm belief, the prospect of finding salvation through the German spirit, and that is why he is so perturbed when he sees R. casting doubt on the latter. We are silent for a moment, and suddenly he asks me, “What are you thinking?” I was thinking of Cervantes’s Numancia and a return to Nature, and that in my youth an old professor told me that Cervantes was more objective than Calderón, who was frightened of the Inquisition.
When I talk at lunch about vegetarianism, he says, “You don’t know how much this subject preoccupies me.” My wretched appearance, probably the result of the constant tension I have been in since Brange’s death, torments R., and I am obliged to invent excuses to explain it!
Sirocco weather, the younger children to the races, return home very happy, and R. praises the naive elegance of the women in Naples, who drive out during the day in the richest colors, conscious of both their clothes and their rank. This is what distinguishes Naples from Paris, he says, where only dismal women display their finery in the street.
R. and I go for a walk in the garden after I have written in his name to Baron Hofmann in Vienna and to Herr v. Bürkel about the decline of the Munich theater. Regarding the B. Blätter, which has arrived, R. says of Dr. Förster’s lecture, “I am like a ghost, I care nothing about what is said of me, whether good or bad.”
In the evening he plays Tristan, the middle of the second act, the Prelude to the third, he sings the first scene, and the apotheosis. The piano score annoys him with its “fussiness”; he says the arrangement is not bold enough, work of this kind should be a complete reincarnation, something like Schlegel’s translations of Shakespeare.