Sunday, February 20:
R. well, working. Children’s day, I play, read, sing with them. In the evening, when I give a mock dinner for them, R. plays, amid great delight, the Gazza Ladra Overture. Then, for ourselves, we take up Luther’s hymn in a cantata by Bach, “Das Wort sie sollen lassen stahn.” R. as always greatly moved by it. “A people which can produce such a thing is a people worthy of respect, and a Jew makes a French opera out of it—that says everything.” And yet—say I—it is these very sounds, desecrated and ignorantly distorted, which have made that opera into a success. “And Bach is Luther,” R. went on. “Just look at the calm way in which he writes the boldest, most daring of things.” — In the evening read Nohl’s Gluck und Wagner, some of it very good (e.g., on Tristan), but much of it unpleasantly bombastic.