Sunday, March 6:
An army doctor in Brunswick has sent some fine sausages! We laugh a lot, for some days ago—thinking of the sausage which Richter brought us when he was looking for a singer for Walther von Stolzing—we had said, “We shall never find such a sausage again.” This time it is for Lohengrin. In return R. sends his portrait with a little verse at the bottom. At lunch R. speaks of his renewed pleasure in Droysen’s book about Alexander. “If I were locked up in prison, I should ask only for Greek literature and things about Greece. From these people we derive joy; I am well aware that they did not dot all the i’s, but from them we have learned happiness, they are without sin.” (Seeing an emotional expression on Hermine’s face, he asked: “Which nation pleases God most? Resignation.”) After lunch Die Walküre, in the evening as well (Wotan’s scene with Fricka and Brünnhilde). During this he gives a loud laugh: “And this is what Kindermann and Wüllner are now to bring off in Munich! I begin to find it funny.” In the evening he says: “You can understand that I felt the need, after writing these parts of the Nibelungen, to leave this element of dreadfulness and to write Tristan und Isolde, which was, so to speak, just a love scene; indeed, I thought of it as an Italian opera, that is to say, to be sung by Italian singers—and in Rio de Janeiro.”