Tuesday, September 28:
R. wakes up cheerfully with the remark, "In this bed there could have slept not only a pope, but the whole schism as well" (Pius VI once occupied our bedroom). But then the sight of the leaves turning yellow fills him with melancholy, and he wishes he were already in Venice, so as to miss the fall. In connection with his letter to the King, he thinks with a shudder of having to concern himself with singers, with the scene painters Doll and Quaglio, and he is vexed by the lack of resolution there.
Many thoughts of Venice; he recalls his favorite hero, Morosini, also Schulenburg. Much at lunch about my father, impossible to describe him, I think. R. says, "Yes, one side of him would always be exaggerated, he eludes all the rules." He thinks I would be able to do it. R. says he himself is not an original, which gives us cause for laughter and reflection.
In the afternoon he plays the A Midsummer Night's Dream Overture and the Egmont Overture with Lusch; he still has some reservations about the beginning of the former, and about the trio in the march he says, "There he ran out of ideas!" When I say that the Egmont Overture will remain eternally young and popular, he says: "Yes, it is Klärchen, Egmont seen through Klärchen's eyes. The scene invoking the citizens, that is what inspired Beethoven, and this is as it should be; whoever tries to convey the many aspects of a drama one by one will come to grief; it must be tackled from a single viewpoint." We stroll to the little cypress wood in a sharp north wind; carts in antique style please R. In the evening he is somewhat tired, but well, and he looks cheerful and full of health. He reads his biography to us, which leads to a discussion of Friederike Meyer; he agrees with me when I call her the most interesting of his female acquaintances.
(Yesterday at lunch he talked again about Tasso and said, "Goethe makes one doubt Tasso's character when, after showing Tasso's deep and genuine bitterness and having him put everything into this one feeling, he allows the Princess to feel nothing but the impropriety of such behavior, so that he then clings to Antonio." Previously I had also wished that, instead of hurrying off, she had cried "Tasso!" and collapsed; now, however, it seems to me to show the poet's inexorable veracity, which is stronger than himself. But R. says one can assume that he would have asked Schiller: How shall I end it, Schiller?)
A few more remarks about my father's diffuse character, with its constantly recurring flashes of significance. Pleasure in Ferry and the fact that a minister of education was made minister for foreign affairs: "I should like to see matters dealt with here as they are in France, and I should gladly give them Metz. They are going about things in the right way."