Thursday, April 7:
The outing was bad for R., and his intensive reflections on the Klärchen music get mixed up in a dream with Fidi’s indisposition, so that he hears it as if in relation to Fidi and wakes up filled with melancholy. He tells me this from the neighboring room as I go off to my bath, but he does it in French, which at once reduces it to a laughing matter. He works, reaches page 103, and begins the second volume of Count G. with enjoyment.
Friend Humperdinck has lunch with us; he inquires about the tempi of the Pastoral and feels that the mood flags somewhat in the final movement. R., after speaking in defense of the finale, says: “That is the question - how to end! The best thing is probably to let it all fade away like a dream! In the C minor, one can say, the finale is the main thing, all the rest a sort of preface to it. With the F major he succeeded completely. In the Eroica he was at the height of his imagination and produced one inspiration after another, but most people haven’t the slightest idea what to do with them.”
We do not go out. Toward evening Herr Francke from London comes to see R., about Tristan and Meistersinger: the project, it seems, is assured. When the conversation touches on the people in Meiningen and what they are doing, also on the Duke himself, R. says: “He looks like an old Saxon duke, and one can easily imagine him leaning on his sword and talking familiarly to Charlemagne. And now all that has been blunted into artistic dilettantism!” When Herr Francke tells us at supper that his father was the town musical director in Königstein, R. says to him, “Say, rather, ‘town musician,’ for that does us honor; my grandfather was gate collector in Leipzig.”
But all these excursions into the outside world worry me, for they tire R.; he can flourish only in an atmosphere of creative tranquillity; what comes from outside just produces fatigue. A few mornings ago he was talking about Pest and had completely forgotten that I was there with him, so disembodied do we feel when we are “outside”! Yesterday we were greatly amused when, at the conclusion of the evening, we discovered a silver laurel wreath and two bronze candlesticks by the stove in the salon - no idea where they came from or how long they had been lying there! R. praises the English in comparison with the Germans; when they think there is something they do not know, they become all attention, and on this it is then possible to build. “But we - we know it all, we are horrible! I can say that, because: J'en suis!” When Herr Francke remarked that Hanslick was just a gnat, R. became very vexed and demonstrated to him what such a man can do in the way of treating obstacles for existing talents and destroying means.