Monday, September 13:
R. had a somewhat restless night, but he rises in cheerful spirits, goes to bang on the children’s door and imitate the thunderstorm, hears Eva and Loldi crowing in competition with each other, is pleased with them all, yesterday very much with Fidi and the stability of his character, and settles down to some ruling even before breakfast. When I greet him, he says, “I have the strength to work on it only because I have made up my mind to go to America and thus achieve what I want, to free the work, to stage it only in Bayreuth, and to become completely independent.” He intends to take all the children.
He is hurt by the King’s failure to reply to him about replacing the theater director, hopes nevertheless to get from him the promise that, if Parsifal is performed in the Munich Court Theater, it will be for himself alone.
Lovely walk with R. through the vineyards, we drink milk still warm from the cow, and I have the pleasure of seeing him looking well. He reads Tancred to the end. Then he is pleased with the words of a Frenchman about Tristan. Then he is also pleased with Fidi’s drawings inside the cathedral.
In the evening he reads Goethe’s Die Geschwister to us. And all day long he is in good spirits. The picture of Saint Catherine which he finds in my room brings from him the exclamation, “Heavens alive, to be surrounded by such women!” and when, in the evening, we come to talk about Brackenburg, whom nobody cares for except me, and I wonder what trade he might have pursued, I receive from R., who usually agrees with me, a reply which brings forth peals of laughter: “A bandage maker.”