Monday, February 7:
I ask R. for the “silly theme,” so that you, my Siegfried, will know exactly what he means. Much about the first act of Hebbel’s Herodes und Mariamne. R. works. Some friends at lunch, and in consequence less to report about R., for though he is in very good spirits, he seems to me not quite his usual self. He goes for a walk with Loldi and our friends, because toothache and concern for our little neighbors keep me at home; he says he treated Loldi just as if she were me.
In the evening he writes his score, though he keeps saying how much he would rather be writing symphonies: “All the time I am putting aside themes for the sake of the drama - I cannot do things as, for example, even Weber did, when he introduced his hermit with a dance tune because it happened to occur to him just at that moment.” “Not so much brooding,” he exclaims to Rub. “In your place I would be playing the piano all day long.”
In the evening R. reads to us the extract from the Reichskanzler’s speech, and after that we read the last two acts of Herodes und Mariamne, gripped by it throughout, if also often disturbed by its curious mixture of passion and dryness, poetic flight and prose, profound perceptions and operatic quality. Impossible to compare him with Shakespeare, yet there is truth in it, for example the reappearance of Octavian, the resurgence of passion when he learns that M. is being maltreated; those are motives from life, says R.