Friday, April 1:
R. slept well. At breakfast he says he will write another opera, in which the hero would bear the name of Lenardo. This leads us to the choice of names, and R. describes it as incredibly thoughtless of Goethe to have sought out Italian names (Lothario, Lenardo) for his German novel.
Friedel is hoarse, and it sounds very sad when he answers the Siegfried theme, whistled by his father in the hall, with a soft, hardly audible whistle of his own!
R. is also somewhat irritable at lunch. We go for a walk in the palace gardens, and the first day of April brings us no merriment.
But we are quite gay in the evening, listen in a cheerful mood to an organ fugue by Bach and the Eroica Variations; of the former R. says there is much conventional stuff in the fugue (not the prelude), in the latter he is surprised that B. does not modulate at all.
When everyone has gone, R. dances and orders a half-bottle of champagne, and we chat contentedly, though tears are streaming continuously from my eyes. Weariness of the eyes or of the heart? I do not know.
At the start of the evening R. talked about his dread of the journey to Berlin, and for me there is the added heartache, on Lulu’s account, concerning our probable meeting with