Sunday, September 26:
R. slept well; immediately on waking he begins to talk about the Indians, their culture and their meekness. A gray day, but a happy breakfast. Thoughts of America; decision to save Parsifal at all costs, to allow Schott to publish only the piano score, for a payment of 50,000 marks.
At lunch a temporary clouding of our bright sky through a joke of R.'s for which I am unable at first to find the correct response, and which the children also find surprisingly humorless; but the sky soon clears, and we gaily welcome Fidchen and Joukowsky, who have much to relate concerning Orvieto. I am much impressed with the photographs of Signorelli's frescoes, the artist. The facade of the O. cathedral strikes him as being more in the nature of theatrical scenery, bearing no relation to the rest of the building.
Conversation in the evening; R. again gives vent to his antipathy toward the Romans in both ancient and more modern times, as oppressors of the civilized Italian peoples in the ancient world, as the embodiment of papacy in the modern one. (I fear I may have forgotten to note that R. gets much pleasure from the heads of the popes in the cathedral; he finds such ornamentation much better than "a Greek knot, which means nothing to us, though it certainly meant a lot to the ancient Greeks themselves.")