Sunday, March 20:
Boni’s birthday-Evi unfortunately in bed. Our night was rather restless, since the reading lasted until past midnight. However, R. is not unwell, just a little run down. Much about Doña Mencia-why she does not admit to her husband that the Infante is there, the reason being that she loves the Infante. Then we have the feeling that it is because the Catholic Church does not permit suicide that the most terrible things are turned into a spectacle-often, indeed, treated in a spirit of comedy. After the lines in the first act in which Mencia admits to her maid her love for Enrique, R. exclaims, “There is a poet, an artist!”
At the presentation of gifts Boni is greeted by R. with an improvisation on Elisabeth’s theme, from which he then goes over to the march as she is receiving her gifts. At lunch Jouk. and Rub.-the latter, always somewhat singular, asserts that R. has been advising him to marry an Italian woman. R. recalls early times, when he visited me 18 years ago. The gray carriage and many other things. We then go for a walk in the palace gardens, pleasure in the blackbirds, whose song R. finds the loveliest of all except for nightingales.
At supper he recalls Minna, says that he married her out of jealousy, and remembers with horror that Minna was not shocked by certain intimacies in front of her superiors. In the evening he plays pieces from Die Zauberflöte and Oberon. Regarding the latter, he relates how melancholy it made him as a boy of ten not to be able to find it as beautiful as Der Dreischütz, and how later he then found pleasure in its various individual beauties. The C, E, A, G, F, C, D, C of the fine aria had vexed him. “Oh, we are poor creatures, we Germans,” he exclaims, discussing Weber’s being forced to go to London, his longing to do things somewhat in the Rossini style.
Today he again declares how much he would like to write symphonies, how much he enjoys working with orchestras, how little with theater singers. He says he would call them “From My Diary”; but then he finds the title too pretentious. And he pictures to himself the birth of the universe, some central sun which begins to revolve, out of desire, no, out of fear, and how this agitation born of fear was everywhere, and everything a matter of indifference until one gave things a moral significance. Speaking of our society, he tells me that personalities such as Voltaire seemed to him so individual and so detached from it, and consequently without any real power.