Wednesday, April 13:
There is merriment in the morning between R. and me about the previous evening. R. says that people always expect from him a sort of “Bring on the clowns” and that he should entertain them. Then we come to Shakespeare, the absorption of a whole race by an individual. We discuss the first scene of Banquo’s departure and the meeting with Macbeth, and feel distinctly that a whole potentiality of Nature was embodied in such a man and then vanished forever. But music remains. This is our ever-recurring theme.
At lunch I find R. unwell, very run down. Herr Seitz’s costume sketches reveal to us, in their “masterliness,” all the wretchedness which divides us from others: Flower Maidens like cabaret Valkyries, yet all of it lovely. Deep gloom hangs over R. in consequence; at times he looks just like Siegfried. He calls Levi the Assyrian and jokes about the “assiirana” with which he plays whist. At lunch he talks about the bells to be obtained for Parsifal and about the glass bells in the Munich theater. R. laughs and says such Cyclopean cheesecovers would be just the thing.