Thursday, June 24:
Are impressions such as those of last night too powerful for poor mortals? Or at least for poor me? I wake up in melancholy mood, concerned about R., although he has slept well, with a feeling that my death is near and I wish nothing else. But perhaps it is just the sirocco which is to blame for this mood. When I see him looking well at breakfast, all is in order again, and we luxuriate in memories of yesterday. R. says, “I declare that to be the most perfect thing in every way, religious, philosophic, poetic, artistic.” “One can put Shakespeare’s histories beside it, but he had no Athenian state, no Areopagus as final resort.” I say I would put only the King beside it. R. says, “But that stands outside time, it is something thought up by an individual, only to be made a mess of immediately, as happened with newly established religions.”
We recall many single features; he mentions Clytemnestra’s weariness, her contempt for the chorus, which has indeed condoned the murder of Iphigenia. “Those are these individual, unfathomable features; and all so bloody, drenched in blood. If Thyestes had been a vegetarian,” he adds jokingly, “none of it would have happened.” Then, becoming serious, “It fits in with my work.” Then he tells me that today in the garden he and the children saw a lizard seize a beetle, which struggled and resisted, and he exclaims with a sigh, “If human beings had evolved into gentle creatures, they would still have found enough to remind them of the tragedy of existence!”
R. works on his article and seems satisfied with what he has done. I spend a large part of the day with the Agamemnon choruses. At lunch R. sings to us Mendelssohn’s “Vieles Gewaltige lebt” chorus and mimes the chorus as it was done in Dresden, led by Mitterwurzer: two steps forward, one back.
I do not know what led him at coffeetime to Cromwell and his question whether one could fall from grace, followed by relief when he knew he had not. “Strange as this looks, it does, however, have a deep meaning: a person must know that he has acted according to his deepest impulses. Politics, the world’s reactions, come later, and that is why he asked.” To my inquiry what Frederick the Great would have thought of Cromwell, R. replies: “Surely exactly the same as Voltaire; Fr.’s feelings were rooted in his legitimacy.” He describes his answer to his father regarding his disinheritance, “and arising out of this feeling his resolve to sacrifice everything within his power to the people, who had sacrificed so much for him. Cromwell’s roots were quite different, and two such men can never understand each other.”
R. drives with Fidi to Dreher’s, returns home in good spirits. In the evening The Suppliants, just as moving as Agamemnon. R. says, “In former times I was particularly impressed by the intoxicating musicality of the choral lament and the song, all this raving, forever starting anew.” And to me, when we are alone late in the evening, “What I see here is the musical philosopher, the priest; and what a poet!” He quotes Clyt., where she says that Ag. would be welcomed by Iphigenia.