Wednesday, July 7:
R. rises early, goes for a walk, and tells me about a holly tree in glorious flower. He also tells me that the sea and the sky were both the same color, a deep blue. He then talks with a certain amount of bitterness about Munich and Bayreuth and says, "Should one really sacrifice to these matters the few years one still has to live?"
He takes a bath in the sea, and since his movements are too violent, it has a bad effect on him, and he spits up a little blood. But he feels that on the whole the bath did him good.
Music in the evening; the Sieglinde "Picture"; only the passage of thirds should be played more lightly, he says, not too broadly - they depict Sieglinde's actions, of the kind made when one has been given something pleasing. Recently, regarding Die Meistersinger, he said that the themes he sometimes brings in again at the conclusion should not be played with the full expression belonging to them: "I have written them here in place of arabesques." Then various pieces by Weber - Euryanthe, Preciosa, the "Wilde Jagd."
We go to sleep laughing, because R. told me of a Philistine who sang, "Das ist Lutzows wilde verwegene Jagd gewesen," and one could hear the last word still reverberating. In the Overture to Euryanthe he highly praises the beginning, up to the "O Seligkeit" theme, but then come the weaknesses, he says: "He wanted to show he could do things like the others, Spontini, etc., only better."