Saturday, June 26:
R. gets up early, goes for a walk, enjoys the air, which, he tells me, was like milk of roses. Much at breakfast about his work; he is pleased with the curious relevance of Parsifal, that his conception of sanctity, which makes seduction, conflicts, etc., impossible. In splendid spirits we greet this day, on which in my behalf R. invokes blessings and good fortune, and which for that very reason it brings. “If in patience we bear, God will take care,” he says jokingly in the midst of utterances of the most solemn kind. [A sentence based on untranslatable wordplay omitted.]
Over coffee after lunch he reads to us two fine letters by Goethe and Schiller, having previously remarked, “What they always brought out in each other!” Then he reads something quite splendid and profound by Schiller about language, and Goethe’s equally fine reply with reference to the French, which reminds R. of Berlioz’s “digérer” [“digest”]. In the evening, sitting on the terrace, we come back to these letters, and R. says: “One could write whole books about what is contained in this correspondence, and what have we done with it? As my brother-in-law used to say, ‘What use is nutmeg to a cow?’”
He goes to Dreher’s in the streetcar, and on the Piazza dei Martiri he feels a hand on his arm, Fidi had seen him from a house he happened to be in and ran swiftly to catch up with him: “What a feeling that gives me! I, who for two whole generations was like the Tannhäuser I wrote about, that is to say, a completely finished man! You, Joukowsky, were not even born then. Sometimes I feel like the Flying Dutchman, and then to see this boy before me!” He then tells me how, sitting in the streetcar with Siegfried, he saw Herr v. Stein boarding it and sitting down in front of them without seeing them, till, his attention caught by the conversation between father and son, he turned around and saw them!
Lovely starry sky, later moonlight, curiously melancholy on account of the framework of little clouds, the air glorious! R. talks a lot about the universe, the globe, also the South Pole. “What is the earth in comparison to this huge expanse of water? Like a few scraps rescued from the deluge.” He asks Herr Rubinstein to play something, I ask for the Venusberg music from Tannhäuser, and R. begins the 3rd act with him, starting at the point at which he recently interrupted him, from “da sah ich M’” to the end. We then talk about the first scene, and R. says: “That would be a task for a king, to spend a long time preparing something like this, so that it would be done really beautifully, for it calls for choreography of a completely new kind, and there should be actors in it, too. If only in all the theaters I had directors who were sympathetic to me! Instead of that, well, just look around!” Herr Rub. then plays us some fugues from the 48 Preludes and Fugues: “They are like the roots of words,” R. says, and later, “In relation to other music it is like Sanskrit to other languages.”