Thursday, July 14:
Still fine weather and spa cure. From America a request to supply an unpublished opera for next year’s festival, from Italy a commission to compose a Mass. I tell R. that, when I see this heap of fame steadily mounting, I regret that my place is not occupied by some other woman, who would be pleased by it. R. does not at first understand my absurd remark; when I beg his pardon for it, he says, “No, idle things do not have to remain unspoken.”
He is longing to return to his score and be finished with the cure. The fact that L. Lehmann has not replied disquiets both him and me. He goes off to his reading (Jacolliot’s India) after I have related some things from the French Revue Nouvelle to him and we have both come to the conclusion that Germans have entirely lost the capacity to observe and to describe their observations. R. feels that what is observed by us would always look very trivial. He has business letters to write, among others to Herr Vogl, since Königsberg wants to do Tristan. At lunch he tells us all kinds of stories from Jacolliot. We have supper in the pavilion as Family Rest (“in all treetops is rest”).
The conversation turns to my father and his relationships, and R. says it speaks badly for a man when he cannot live happily with a beautiful and noble woman, yet on the other hand remains faithful to ugly ones out of complaisance. He adds that it does tell one something about a man to see the kind of woman he can live with; he finds an ugly woman terrible, unless her face radiates kindness. In the evening the Jagers, Wolz., Forges. Once again R. exclaims, “My God, what bores you are!” An edition of Grillparzer, sent to Lusch at Hans’s request, brings us to Sappho. R. reads the first scenes and is astonished by their flatness. “Oh, Germania!” cries R., who had read much of it in a very comic way, among other things always speaking the name “Phaon” as if it were a peacock’s call.