Sunday, December 19:
Our night ended with quite a good early-morning sleep, but R.’s countenance is grave as he wishes me good morning. He has already done some reading, Count Gob.’s Amadis, and is little edified by French poetry; he finds the syllable-counting, which excludes rhythm, repellent.
At midday he reads to me the draft of his letter to Herr Frege for Hans. Solemn feelings. In the afternoon we go for a walk in the palace gardens; in the evening R. copies out his letter, and after supper we finish Cervantes’s story with ever-increasing enjoyment. “I see the eye which saw all this” I am often interrupted by loud laughter from my audience; every feature of it grips us, and all imitations seem to us prosaic and clumsy in comparison with the original. This charming masterpiece strikes him as so “light-footed.”
At lunch R. came back to Amadis; he dislikes the light tone, taken from Ariosto. Last night, before supper, he came to tell me that he had just seen a large spider in his study, and when he went downstairs, he found an advertisement for the Brunswick lottery lying there. He would like Fidi to buy a ticket. He was vexed with the Grimm dictionary and its untidy editing. But Bismarck’s pompousness toward the Greek envoys amused him.
A letter from Busch in a philosophic vein, which Herr Levi sent me, displeases him; he says he once knew a brewer’s son who wrote just like that. But we women, he adds, form a good opinion of somebody for one reason or another, and then we never drop him, and that is very good of us, not entirely bad.
In the morning R. recalls the chorus at the end of Die Zauberflöte, how Levi had not understood it and took it too fast, clumsily allowing the men’s voices to drown the delicate singing of the women. It just shows, he says, how conductors do not bother themselves about what is happening on stage. He copies out his letter to Frege and shows me that he has written it without mistakes, whereas he always makes mistakes when writing to the King. But for him this has been a happy and an important task, which came to him quite naturally.
At lunch a statement of his makes us laugh heartily; Vogl is said to have observed that the conductor Levi was going mad. R. says I was to blame for that, for I had turned a juif errant into a juif concentré, a statement which produces loud laughter. We go for a walk in pouring rain, but are nevertheless in good spirits, always able to put many things out of our minds.
In the evening he works on his score and shows me how carefully he has erased one passage. I receive friend Feustel, who tells me that his son-in-law was received in Meiningen by Hans with a flood of complaints about Bayreuth, and particularly about Wolz., who had misled him into signing the Jewish petition, whereas he sees that R. abstained and now stands well with the Jews. He, Hans, made the sacrifice and was hissed, etc. This has a dismal effect. I suggest reading, and we begin Cervantes’s The Generous Lover, but such Turkish tales interest us very little. Our mood remains what it was, and we start reminiscing. It behooves us now to stand by each other, to recognize the justice of all hardships...