Friday, January 28:
R. slept well, and though our morning conversation returns anxiously to the subject which is foremost in our thoughts, it does so in such a way that at lunch R. can refer to it jokingly through the story of a man who spoke of obstacles in a horse race. “What was the obstacle?” “I didn't have a horse.”
R. observes that he also has no horse, that is to say, Hans will not read the letters. But he does some work, and even though he says, “Parsifal bores me, I should like to do something else,” his spirits are raised by some good work. In conversation he recalls my arrival at Tribschen and how I said to him, “Now get down to Siegfried,” and how he eventually completed the whole thing after long interruptions, and with pleasure, despite his momentary mood of disgruntlement. Yesterday he talked about the puppet theater in Heidelberg, our delight in it. Blessed memories return, how cut off from the world we were, and how alone in the world, the children still small.
Our friends in the evening. Rub. plays us the Adagio from Sonata [Opus] 106, in which R. sees the beginnings of all modern music (Schumann, Brahms), and I realize, with something like dismay, that a piece of music held to be the highest degree of art no longer makes very much impression on me — it seems to me more like an improvisation, left to a great artist to interpret, than a work of art in itself. “How different is it!” says R., who can discern little genuine Beethoven in the piece.
After that the conversation turns to my father, St. Gallen (1856), where he played the 106, life at that time, “such a subsoil of manure and snuff for such a thing to flourish in.” And again and again, in the evening and during the day, Hans and what we should now do.
(An absurd photograph has been sent to him for signature; beneath it he writes, “I am not so handsome as this.”)