Saturday, August 28:
He wakes up and says he has had a terrible dream about me: I wanted to leave him. He calms down, however, goes to sleep again, and tells me that he has had a pleasant dream about us: we were playing a new Beethoven composition as a piano duet; the theme consisted of four notes, the entrance was difficult, he missed it, wondering whether I had noticed, for I continued playing without faltering.
Then he tells me the nasty first dream in detail. We were in a public garden, and I declared loudly and at length that I no longer wished to live with him and could no longer put up with his grumbling, and others agreed with me, including Cornelius, who was sitting nearby and nodded his head. R. got up and went to one side, where someone said to him, "You are a fine monsieur; everybody knows what you said about Weber, too." "Do not speak to me, my dear sir, about Weber," and in his pain and anger it occurred to him that he had not had any coffee, and he ordered some; it took a long time to come, and in the meantime his terrible situation went through his mind, in the fullest detail.
Very pleasant breakfast in the salon, with a view of "the theater," always hope. [In margin: "An article entitled Mozartiana reminds us of the wretchedness of Mozart's final year, quite terrible and upsetting; R. says it could not be otherwise in this world of ours. I find it much more difficult to understand his friends than the outside world."] Through all our miseries I see in my mind the Three Graces, see their convolutions translated into movement and hear the music from Tannhäuser, and the lovely sounds and moving limbs bring solace to my heart. R. plays Parsifal (the "Good Friday Music") before breakfast. He works, and at lunch says jokingly that he is not obliged to say on what.
In the afternoon we go for a walk in the little wood opposite, but R. finds the steep paths all the more of a strain since he was not able to sleep in the afternoon. But the site pleases him, and in the evening we experience a few happy hours, made unforgettable by the fact that R. plays to us the beginning of the Adagio from the 9th, and [Schubert's] mir gegrüßt is also played. We read about the cathedral in Burckhardt and discover in his supercilious, coldly dismissive tone traces of his influence on Nietzsche. R. says, "From where does he get these rules which enable him to criticize the builders of the cathedral, for instance?" R. read the scene in Numancia where the boy throws himself from the tower. [Enclosed a postcard from the president of an American theater society; see notes.]