Saturday, July 3:
R. slept well but finds the air somewhat tiring; in particular he feels the absence of shade on his morning walk: "I had that in Bayreuth, but no sun." At eleven o'clock he calls me in to dictate the beginning of the 2nd part of his work; recently I showed him the lines I had written about the chorus in the Oresteia, and he noted something down, saying he would also like to mention it.
He put down the [Goethe-Schiller] correspondence at once to read our friend Stein's work on G. Bruno. From the correspondence he mentions the "sect for good" and applies it to Bayreuth, saying that we should be the sect for good.
We make music in the evening; the waltzes yesterday reminded us of [Weber's] Invitation to the Dance; talking of Berlioz's orchestration of this piece, R. says he considers it a complete failure; today he asks Rub. to play it to us, before that the conclusion of Die Meistersinger, beginning with the "Wach' auf" chorus (which the children sing) - R. says there is so much good humor and merriment in it.
In the evening he talked about Lenbach's manner, which he thinks bears some resemblance to that of the sculptor Hahnel, because both of them are witty and both regard their own things as clumsy; he does not really finish anything, daubs rather than paints. (Recently he told friend J., as he was covering a canvas with charcoal, "Humans love blackening whatever shines.")