Saturday, July 16:
I come upon R. in the garden turret with Dr. Landgraf. The cure is finished, and for his convulsive cough R. will need sea air.
Our conversation at breakfast reverts to Hans, as always, his state of wretchedness. I tell R. that Hans has also quarreled with Herr Hillebrand in Florence over the Jews. R. observes, “All these Renaissance people are friends of the Jews.” The young trees surrounding us attract our attention; they are like olive trees. We talk about caring for them, about botany, then about animals, oysters, and the wonderful way in which pearls are formed, snails and their shell-houses. We come to human beings, and I ask R. whether I am wrong in my feeling that the beautiful decorations of the ancient Germans were, so to speak, innate, rather than the result of a lengthy period of civilization. He thinks I may well be right, and then talks of the Greeks, saying that the human body meant everything to them, to the Spartans in their own persons, to the Athenians in representations, and this was also a factor in making them free.
R. does not work today, but is all the same in good spirits, saying one of the good things about Jacolliot is that one can skip much of it. Thunderstorm. In the salon, conversation about Schott and the publication of Parsifal. R. decides to write to him himself. Frl. Uhlig has written. R. feels no inclination to buy the originals of his letters. Some talk about Levi, who has become distasteful to R.
After coffee R. played the Freischütz Overture, utterly splendid. [Added in margin: “Today R. talked a lot about his dogs.”] In the evening Rub. plays us some things from the same work; at the duet between Agathe and Ännchen, which enchants us, R. exclaims, “La brute germanique - this brought that about!” The Don Giovanni and the Egmont Overtures are played by Rub., and the latter is at the same time played on me by R., causing great amusement: he gave only the Bullrich, as he calls it, to the sofa, the repeated high C’s on my head! But he has many criticisms to make of the performance! He takes leave of Lusch, with jokes on both sides, and when I, going off with R. to bed, pass through the bathroom, he says: “Do you know what I have just been telling myself? This girl will be able to say in her epitaph, ‘He was fond of me as well, and that is a great deal, for he loved only my mother.’ ” [The word “me” inserted in pencil in a different handwriting.] (Dannreuther reports the purchase of a tom-tom for the bells.)