Tuesday, February 15:
R. tells me the comical dream he had: the stuttering Count Du Moulin read his article out loud and stuttered so much over the word "Witzbarkeit" - I had drawn his attention yesterday to this mistake - that we all had to laugh. He tells me some things from C. Frantz's article, which criticizes Moltke's remark that war comes from God, and he concludes: "But it would have to be a king - he would have to be concerned for his people and make the decision to abandon this militarism. But just look at them all!" He writes a little verse for the Knights of the Holy Grail, which I then send off. At lunch he tells me that he gets more pleasure from working on his score after breaking off to do some other work. Over coffee Dr. Landgraf performs a little operation on his finger, which is still painful. He talks of Prof. Pott's quarrelsome tone and his absurd fury with Gobineau, since the latter believes in decay and is not impressed by the fact that we now have railways!
We go for a walk in the palace gardens in glorious weather; R. suddenly says, "I can understand why Beethoven liked the variation form so much; he could be much more melodic, shaping things, and the conventional symphonic form restricted his creative powers much more than variations." At supper I find R. rather irritable: was it his work, or the book? "I am reading German flour again, and it is like getting badly ground flour between one's teeth." On the other hand, he is increasingly attracted to Gobineau's idea, and when I say, "If we disregard time and space, there is surely no such thing as decay," R. replies, "The thought I am occupied with is whether morality should not be preserved as being that to which everything tends - survival is then a matter of complete indifference." He remains more or less in this mood until Bach's B Minor Fugue is played. "What a world that is!" he exclaims. "Planets circling around each other, no feeling, yet all of it is passion, will - no intellect; Beethoven's art, by contrast, is a dancing couple." We then ask for Die Meistersinger; after Rub. has played the Prelude to the third act and the first scene, R. says to me, "Hans Sachs has married Eva," gets up, declares, "The entire condition of German art is contained in this first scene," a remark the others do not understand; he has it played again, singing it up to the "Prize Song." "Never before has the master given us such a friendly greeting." R. then enlarges upon Germany, which, he had been convinced, would acclaim this work, though of course it has been so badly performed, and he becomes agitated in a way which is not good for him. I send our friends away, we remain alone. "What does it matter whether it is performed, whether Germany behaves in this way or that way? We still have it." He: "It's only to the others that I say such things," and we immerse ourselves in happiness and memories! "None of it fits," he says, "I have married Eva." I: "But according to Herwegh you are Sachs and Walther in one, and according to me you are all of them, Tristan and Marke, Lohengrin and Parsifal." And to this we link congenial memories of Herwegh and all who congratulated us sincerely on our marriage, Sulzer, Marschall, and several others. And we keep coming back to Die Meistersinger; of the Prelude to the third act he says, "That is the loveliest thing I ever wrote." He then speaks about the specks of dust playing around Sachs in the morning sunbeams, and keeps exclaiming gaily, "But it doesn't fit, none of it fits." He becomes reflective; I ask him why: "A bassoon passage." "Orchestration is your way of cobbling," I say. "You are probably right," he replies. Then he expresses his annoyance over always having to deal with apprentices, like the musicians around him. But we soon go back to the topics that concern us and to Schopenhauer, who, in R.'s estimation, would probably have gone along with him as far as I.-S. and T., but certainly not from then on. Regarding his errors in the application of his theories, so right in themselves, R. says, "It makes one feel that an artist can be a philosopher, but not a philosopher an artist." Previously, in reply to a question from Rub., he had described Mendelssohn's daemonic and impish manner, all the more sinister because of its taciturnity, and suggested that possibly Tannhäuser might have had a strange intoxicating effect on him, for he died not long afterward. And we part happily, after our souls' spirits have become immersed in each other! Before lunch R. chose watches with me for Eva and Loldi. Recently R. expressed his pleasure at having provided in Der Fang des Nibelungen a complete picture of the curse of greed for money, and the disaster it brings about.