Friday, February 11:
I reproach R. for not realizing that I consider his article to be of the greatest value. R. replies, unbelievingly, "You are quite correct: everything one writes, all articles, are silly nonsense." And when I protest, he says I should learn to recognize a joke. It is just like the president saying, "My wife finds me boring." "That is what I am saying: you know it all, all the ideas have been discussed between us, and so it can be no pleasure to you to hear an article like that read out loud. At least, to my way of thinking." We laugh about the president and part in cheerful spirits.
Around lunchtime I find R. altering the ending of his article, to my regret. At lunch he is a little irritable at first; his fingers are hurting him, but he gradually regains his spirits, and over coffee he is in a very good mood, even if the bad weather makes him talk at length about his Venetian projects. I do not remember why Mozart is mentioned; R. says: "In him one can really see what the world is. How easy it would have been to make things easy for him, to say to him, 'Come here, Mozart, you'll be treated well' - and a person like that was obliged to struggle with the most abject poverty." Some days ago R. said, "How touching it is when he, this Salzburger, this Austrian, describes himself, in the horrifying state of our empire, as a German musician."
We go for a walk in the palace gardens in spite of the bad weather, heavy showers, and speak in praise of Italy, where such things would be possible. Two newspaper clippings are enclosed here between the pages. "Music in Hospitals" begins with the sentence, "Our great master Richard Wagner's fine idea, to make use of music in the treatment of illness, has become a reality in England." Cosima notes: "Thus," R. observes, "does one become a fable in one's own lifetime." The second clipping, from the Deutsches Familienblatt, is a reproduction of a picture by A. H. Bakker Korff, depicting three women in a salon. Beside this Cosima has written that R. is touched by the picture. He looks at it for a long time and is pleased that someone has seen things in this way. In particular he finds the "old maid" singing extraordinarily full of feeling; the women listening are also full of surprises, whether old maids, widows, or wives. The prosperous bourgeois life depicted there interests him, as do the costumes. With our restricting clothes, he observes, such a thing would not be possible.
In the evening cercle: Zumpe from Frankfurt, W.'s, and others. Rub. plays first the Flower Maidens and then Beethoven's Variations, to our admiring delight. R. remarks on the richness of these extraordinary compositions: "With any three of these variations he could have written a symphony." When our friends have gone, he reads to me the revised ending of his article, which seems to me more fitting than the first, and R. himself says that he always meant to write about us, not about the Jews. And yet I have to tell him what strange feelings it arouses in me when he alters anything at my instigation; I say that for me every idea he has is sacred. "You foolish girl," he says. "As if we were not always in harmony!" And indeed it happens quite regularly with us, in both the deepest and the most trivial things. Today, for example, he said he was now reconciled to the Freemasons' new building, and a few moments earlier I had wanted to make the same remark. And so I believe that what I said in connection with the first ending merely expressed his own feelings.
When we finished reading, he thought of the sad music which the shahs of Persia ordered played to them before going to sleep. "You could do that better than anyone; it would be something like 'O sink hernieder, Nacht der Liebe.'" "Oh, no, that is happy, not sad, a luxuriating after their wild discussion of their predicament." "I still find it incomprehensible that an audience can follow all that with interest, as in Munich." I: "And yet it is the favorite work of the barbarians in particular - Lenbach, for example." R.: "I gladly admit that there is something intoxicating about its big musical complexes." In the palace gardens he was pleased by the sight of a little girl with a red scarf around her head and some school folders and books: "That is something I like to see," he says, "there is something so respectable, so dutiful about it." And he mentions Bruno Bauer's remark about the Germans being placid, a remark which has always pleased him greatly. I say it seems to me that in their contacts with Israelites the Germans come to grief not only on account of their bad qualities, but also their good ones: for example, their undemandingness, which makes them so capable of idealism; now, under the pressure of these rapacious people, this is turning into indolent insensitivity.