Tuesday, April 5:
R. slept well. I woke up suddenly as if I had heard some inner cry from my heart - who might be in danger? But Richard was all right, and this stab was probably a stray memory of old times. The newspaper reports a speech by Bismarck about prestige; R. says, “The French speak a language with no knowledge of its roots, just according to convention, and then we use it without understanding the convention.”
I pay a call on our poor neighbor and report that she has been to see her husband in the mental home and that he was quite mild and resigned, which R. finds very touching. Much about the costumes and stage properties in Parsifal; Jouk. shows us the Knights’ mourning garb. We do not go out of doors, on account of the north wind.
In the evening I go downstairs to see how he is getting along; he is working busily on a viola passage, does not wish me to go away, but reproaches me for being the cause of his writing something wrongly. In the evening Herr Rub. plays to us one of Beeth.’s first sonatas. R. does not enjoy it. Before that he read to us the women’s scene in Calderon’s Hombre pobre todo es trazas, quite intoxicating in the wealth and depth of its emotion. But following that, the first act of Macbeth - terribly beautiful!
When everyone has gone, we stay together talking, and after we have separated to undress, then come together again in the lower green room, we continue talking, and R. looks forward to the better times in which such men as Shakespeare, now prophets in the wilderness, will be brought in to form, as it were, part of a divine service. Thus the world once was - first a ceremonial act spoken, then to Holy Communion.