Saturday, December 11:
R. slept well. At breakfast he says to me, “Perhaps I shall read Freytag’s Die Ahnen after all,” but then he adds, “No, to have to attend to inventions by people like that!” And when I remark that there is little talent in Germany, he says, “Yes, a sense of form is enough to attract attention.” The wind blows unceasingly but does not dispel the fog; R. maintains that it is a monsoon, the most extreme form of south wind. He gaily reproaches me for having on that earlier occasion, by returning to Germany, merely obeyed the inner voice of duty in quite a useless manner — “All these messieurs are not really worth it”; we should otherwise now be settled in Italy, probably in Como.
In the morning he continues with Schelling, and toward noon he works on his score, leads Amfortas to his bath. At lunch he indicates the atmosphere of gray and brown and says, “There is your Gobelin.” All the same we go for a walk in the palace gardens, and he decides to go to the Villa Loredano next winter, via Seville and Palermo. “To regard Germany just as a concert hall and then to derive enjoyment from what grew up in adversity.” Yesterday, watching Marke happily sniffing around in the palace gardens, he said: “What a poet he is — Ossian in the mists of the past! He is utterly immersed in the ecstasy of scenting things out.”
In the salon he is pleased by the frames of the two pictures, him and me by Lenbach, since they make the pictures invisible. He says he likes this beveled gold, and then he talks of pretty varieties of marble, but “The pleasures of furnishing begin only with folds.” In the evening he does some work, and when I come down in the Swan dress, he wants to “form a group with me” and sits down at my feet. But before that we talk of the melancholy of Amfortas’s theme, then of his second “Sterbe, höchste Gnade,” which I find gentler. R. says it denotes collapse in his agony.
In the evening he plays the Overture to Jessonda with Rub., remembers having heard it under Weber’s direction. Then the C-sharp minor Quartet, and since friend Jouk. tells me frankly that he did not understand the first movement, I ask R. to read us the words he wrote about it in his Beethoven, which move me to tears. Then the Kaisermarsch as a piano duet, and, scattered in between all this, Jn. Pérès. When we are alone, R. says more about the quartet to me: “Everything lies in the first 4 notes at the beginning, then he busies himself with some fugal writing, which is not very interesting, even for musicians. As I said, it was a point of honor with a musician to write a fugue. But through the roughnesses and awkwardnesses there emerges a mood such as I can well imagine him to have had. And it is splendid that he felt the urge, after the E-flat major Quartet, to write this. And all the passion lies in the last theme.” But Rub. could not get the tempo of the theme in the second movement, R.’s favorite theme.