Friday, December 31:
The night was a good one — better for me than for weeks past, which is greeted as a sort of triumph. R. reads Gobineau and writes what he calls "an artificial letter" to Herr Batz. We go for a walk in the palace gardens at one o'clock and again later in the afternoon, when, however, our walk was "washed clean," as R. puts it, for it was raining.
Over coffee we discuss Siegfried's development, and since R. talks about the importance of having a companion for his studies and his games, I have to laugh when he irritably exclaims, "These boys are all so precious!" He feels that the parents — such as the Giessels — will not let us have one. His instinctively felt right to demand whatever he wants is expressed here so clearly, and is so different from anyone else, that I find it a joy to observe.
An act of our friend Seidl's also gives R. the opportunity of showing his whole nature: Seidl told us the day before yesterday that he would no longer go to the Sonne when meetings were going on; then we hear that he did go after all and stayed up until two in the morning. R. is annoyed about it. I observe that he probably made the decision impulsively, sitting lonely and melancholy in his room; R. disputes this and is indignant at the lie, also at "this stupid addiction to beer, which is driving the Germans to ruin."
"It is all right to lie out of shame," he observes, "when one finds oneself in a false situation, but this hypocrisy is despicable" — and his face is severe, his voice rings out, and his eyes flash! He also says, "Just don't try to make yourself look good — I see people as they are; then all right, then I accept them."
In the evening the candles on the tree are lit again, and fortunes are told with lead. But before that R. plays to us the first movement of the A Major Symphony and tells us his ideas about it (Dionysian celebrations), as he has often done before — but this evening so eloquently, so absorbed is he by the picture and animated by the subject, that once again his countenance gleams; it is now pale and rapt, and he does not even notice that Fidi has handed him his lead.
We do not stay up for midnight. We experienced it yesterday in the salon, when we were hungrily seeking some rusks, and R. was pleased by my picture by Lenbach (the white one), both figure and pose. After reading us something from an article by Helm about the Beethoven quartets — which he finds very good — he ends by reading the invocation to the Graces by Aristophanes, whom he describes as the greatest of Greek geniuses. He recalls with pleasure the sense of lucidity with which he read it years ago in Dresden.
In the morning he tells us about Herr Förster, the theatre director in Leipzig who demanded some music for The Merchant of Venice. When Herr Neumann made difficulties, he exclaimed, "I cannot present the Merchant without music — sooner Götterdämmerung!"