Tuesday, July 20:
we are having breakfast and thinking of the night, so rich and significant. At 11 o’clock he dictates to me, and when, while we are working, cannons roar to signal the arrival of the King, R. remarks that here people celebrate more than the whole of Nature, and, “It would be nice if one could assume that the entire population were really glad when the King arrived.”
He had summoned me with sounds from Parsifal, the passage where the hero comes to the Temple for the second time, “having surmounted the death of his mother and much else besides”; and when at coffeetime he plays some of the Venusberg music (having told us that in spite of all the wrong notes he would in his own way provide the accents with all the necessary energy, something nobody except my father could do), I say that here is proof that everything in art is ideal, the fact that these sounds and P.’s sounds came from the same being.
R. says, “Everything cries!” and also: “It is the same in the Venusberg as in Tristan, in the one it is resolved in grace, in the other in death. Everywhere this cry, this lament, and these accents come from a rather different place from that of Berlioz’s Sabbath affairs.” (One evening recently he said that this work had been a vain effort: on the stage it cannot be done properly, and in the concert hall it sounds bad, just a wild noise.)
We speak of his trouble, the wretched heat rash: “One must pay for everything,” he says. “When one has the kind of skin which enjoys touching soft things like my cigar case, then it easily gets overheated.” He continues talking about the time of the composition of the Venusberg music and says, “I was never restricted to a single element.” He receives a pleasant surprise from Leipzig, a larger payment than he was expecting, and the cashier, Herr Rosenheim, asks him for his photograph; R. sends one to him with the words, “In der Kasse gern daheim, grüsse ich Herrn Rosenheim” [“I send greetings to Herr Rosenheim, happily at home in his cash office”].
In the evening much about Goethe and Schiller, the eternal complaints arising from the climate; then he enlarges upon the unbearable Lothario (even the name is horrible, he says), and repeats that if Goethe had not spurred himself on to Elective Affinities and finally Faust, no one would know what we possessed in him. Before these evening conversations he enjoyed watching the children in the sea from the terrace, then he is pleased with the Decameron, our little company sitting to the right of the terrace in the moonlight, listening to Pepino’s songs. He is also pleased by what I tell him of Fidi’s lessons with me.
Our conversation touches on December 2, and after a description of its horrors, R. says, “And that is how one becomes a humane ruler and one’s nation’s benefactor, which he undoubtedly was.” And when I utter the words économie de santé [“saving of blood”], which some people use to describe December 2, “The French have a word for everything, which enables them to shrug things off.” “You need cynicism like that to remain cheerful and well disposed after such horrors.”
He takes a coal-tar bath toward midnight and then gets into his “vexation machine,” his bed. But he soon leaps out, and we are up the whole night, watch the sunrise, but this time without pleasure, with unfeeling indifference, for R.’s state is a pitiable one. The only thing he tells me with a certain amount of enjoyment is that he has seen the singers, who during the nights have been irritating him so with their singing, taking their departure between 2 and 3 o’clock, and that it touches him to think of them now playing their instruments (guitar, violin, flute) by themselves.