Saturday, April 2:
R. slept well. Our morning conversation touches on how ill-natured musicians are (Brahms, Berlioz); R. says they are perhaps more irritable than other people.
I realize ever more deeply that when he (R.) sometimes says things which are offensive and deeply wounding, he does it with complete innocence, and he has a daemonic instinct for being right. The fact that one is so defenseless against it is what makes one feel so uncomfortable.
Today he writes three pages of his score and shows me that he has arrived at the mein Sohn Amfortas passage.
Over coffee we go through newspapers of all kinds.
We then take a walk in the palace gardens; but the raw wind does not agree with R., he is attacked by chest spasms, and when we reach home, he sits down on the biclinium, unable for a time to go upstairs.
In the evening, whist, and afterward Count Gobineau’s article.
When we hear that Herr Forster has been maltreated by some Israelites, R. says, “The Germans have never thrashed reviewers, but the Jews thrash Germans!”