Friday, September 10:
R. slept well, gets up in good spirits and returns to the bedroom, saying it is nice here, particularly when one knows there is someone there who “means something” to one. This happy expression is followed by the remark, “You are Werther and Lotte in one, passionate like him and sensible like her!” He finds the narration in Werther excellent, Werther’s outpourings in the middle section, on the other hand, rather long-drawn-out. He thinks it incomprehensible of Lotte not to say to Albert when he arrives that something has happened, and to tell him of her first meeting with W.
R. asks plaintively whether Fidi is devoid of wit; he seems not to like it when one makes witticisms. I visit the picture gallery and have to put up with much joking about my preference for gilded backgrounds. Another thunderstorm, and between times the Fl. Blätter, which R. finds extremely entertaining; he tells us a series of anecdotes from it and is much amused, among other things, by the statement that someone has the writer’s itch. Another thunderstorm, no going outdoors, his work still ruling lines.
Toward evening R. plays the various national anthems, also his “Nikolai” hymn; as he is playing the Marseillaise I am once again struck by its unreligious, popular flavor. R. says, “With that they have brought many thousands of people to their feet, and we Germans have no folk song like it, just think of ‘Die Wacht am Rhein,’ which they sang in Versailles!” I mention the “Kaisermarsch”: “A very good thing,” says R., “that so little notice is taken of it.”
In the evening I ask for Tasso, and R. reads the first scene; but he finds its chatter, as he calls it, repulsive, and he puts it down. “All in falsetto, not a single genuine tone,” he exclaims. He goes on to Egmont and is utterly delighted by it; in particular the scene with Orange is quite shattering.