Thursday, December 9:
R. had a good night and is cheerful in spite of some business matters, among other things, Voltz and Bate, though Feustel writes that this affair is taking a favorable turn. At lunch we discuss Fischer’s appointment as conductor in Munich, which has just taken place, and R. says, “All a person has to do is come within 20 paces of me and he wants me to make him a conductor.” He has received a newspaper containing a report on Robert Springer’s lecture on “Religion and Art” — it seems to have been a very nice lecture. Regarding another report, which says that Wagnerians proclaim him (R.) to be Christ, he says gaily, “Thank you very much indeed.”
We go for a walk in the palace gardens in order, as R. says, to obey the 11th commandment. Boni’s paleness causes him concern, “The girls are going crazy one after another” — and he breaks the ice in his own peculiar way by saying to the child at lunch, “Tell me, are you in love?” “Too much chatter and too much food — that’s what is wrong with me,” he says. In the morning we went through former times of separation: “We would not have stayed alive much longer,” he says, “and that is why I seized on Röckel’s misdeed as if it were a salvation.”
Chatting about all kinds of things with our friends in the evening: Africa yet again, “Mother Earth’s delayed birth”; then coal mines, hopes that electricity will make coal superfluous. Also about salt being less necessary with vegetables than with meat: “Yes,” he exclaims, “we wander over the face of this earth like the gods in Valhalla and never think of all this night and this horror beneath us.” He now has a new volume of the General Staff’s report, and he tells us of the heroic deeds at Belfort: “It is impossible not to admire such things, but what was the point of putting all these forces in danger?” He talks of his intention of staging a mourning ceremony and says he still wants to write some funeral music, for which he would take as motto the reply of a dying sergeant to his officer: “Sir, I die for Germany.” “I die for Germany,” he exclaims, “what a state of ecstasy!” I observe that this was our mood in Tribschen, and he says, “True — and what came of it?” When our friends have departed, we sit for a while longer in the salon with the two elder girls and enjoy their chat and their prettiness. “Gnothi seauton,” he says to me. “Know thyself — it is we ourselves in whom we take delight.”
[Added in margin: “R. plays the Benedictus from Mozart’s Requiem.”]
The following postscripts have been added at the bottom of this and the next three pages: “Yesterday he said, ‘At every word I ask myself what it is and whether one is not talking nonsense.’ At supper he tells us that he had conceived all his works by the time he was 36, from then on he just carried them out. After reading the newspaper report, he says, ‘With the Germans everything is mixed up in confusion like Marke’s supper — a carrot here, a bit of cabbage there, all good things in themselves, but no specific identity, and covering it all a lukewarm broth, neither hot nor cold.’ Recently R. jokingly quoted Antonio to Lusch, who had become a little overexcited: ‘Were I now like, etc.’ We talk about Tasso, and when I say that I admire the poet’s truthfulness, which forced him to that ‘Begone’ of the Princess’s, however embarrassing we might find it, he says, ‘But in that case the poet should not select such motives.’ About Kundry’s kiss R. said recently, ‘What he cannot learn from any doctor or armorer, a woman teaches him.’ Recently, too, when it was suggested that R. had carried on the Beethoven type of melody, he denied it emphatically, saying that had been something complete in itself: ‘I could not have composed in the way I have done if Beethoven had never existed, but what I have used and developed are isolated strokes of genius in my dramatic predecessors, including even Auber, allowing myself to be led by something other than opera.’ ‘Bismarck is now regaling Germany with scraps from France, with the tobacco monopoly, which had already been introduced in Alsace.’”