Thursday, July 1:
R. up very early, goes for a walk, but still suffers from the sun. I tell him about a letter from Wolz.; R. reflects on performances and says how reluctant he is to concern himself with all these things, for example, a performance of Tannhäuser.
He then asks what the stage decorations are like in Munich, and when I describe them to him, he says, "When menials build, monarchs have their hands full." Our friend J.'s Pieta, now on show, leads him to its subject, which he says one should not have paraded constantly before one's eyes - it should be kept in some secret place, in a crypt. When I say that one of the advantages of our age has been to acquire a closer knowledge of Christ's personality, R. adds, "And without any loss of his divine qualities; all the trimmings, the endless talk in the 4th Gospel, all that is discarded; it would be a task for a great poet to write a pure gospel."
R. is worn out at lunch, and he complains of our "stuffy conversations," which come from our not finding it easy to ignore his state of mind. Our friend's picture, the Pieta, leads him to the subject of modern painting, which does nothing thoroughly, just daubs, whereas in Titian, for example, the coloring has a spiritual quality. "Extraordinary," he says, his eyes still resting on the picture, "that the mother, who in real life disappears entirely, should be called upon to fill such a role."
We part; as we were sitting in silence, he suddenly let out such a sigh that I asked him if he was not feeling very well. He, calmly, "I am not feeling very well," then with a smile, "No, it is just my thoughts going to and fro and the restlessness of my brain which makes me sigh." After our first embrace he comes back to me and says, "We shall stick together!" Yesterday, toward the end of supper, he said to Stein, "I am coming closer to your view: human beings do not have to be so evil, I know what needs to be done in order to regenerate them, and then we shall play them the Pastoral Symphony!" "They will have long to wait, as Schleinitz says, before they get an emperor like that." "Before they get a God as good as that," I say.
We stroll to the belvedere in the afternoon; here R. often sings a theme from La Sonnambula (chorus gathering on stage), and when, as we stroll back, I sing the first theme of the F major Quartet, he says, "That is a real shuffling theme." In the evening he is feeling so unwell that he goes to sit by himself in the salon with Goethe and Schiller, while we, at his request, sit on the terrace chatting as best we can; we break up at 9:30, and R. goes through what he calls a crisis, after which he feels better. He told us of the death of Grafe, the foreman bricklayer who built our house and with whom we had much to do; now he has fallen from a scaffold. Many good creatures have now left us: Dittmar, the foreman, Luise Feustel, Rus, the municipal gardener, Brange. Good souls, both human and animal, who have been close to us in various ways.