Tuesday, February 8:
While I am greeting Fidi in my bed, R. notices a spider on it and removes it quickly. “A spider in the morning brings dire warning,” I had to say aloud; R. denounces my superstition, saying that the powers which weave our troubles lie within us. But the troubles have turned up—my elder children gave me cause for concern; but I will willingly bear it and keep silent about it.
R. works, wants to play for me what he has written, but cannot do it, which grieves him; at lunch he tells me that while he was composing, it had occurred to him that his journey to Paris, when he saw me for the first time (rue Casimir Perier, October 9–10, 1853), had been his voyage in quest of a wife; but on that occasion I had been the Tristan, who noticed nothing.
He comes back to Mozart and says he wants to build the whole philosophy of music out of one movement of a Mozart symphony; precisely because it is so simple and melodically so infinitely free. Beethoven would be a more difficult model—the first movement of the Eroica is impossible to define.
Letters about the Council, the story of the Patriarch of Chaldea is confirmed!