Thursday, July 28:
Our morning conversation revolves around A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and we find ourselves still laughing heartily at Bottom’s “Not a word of me,” which shows him to be a complete original, a being such as only Nature and Shakespeare can bring forth. And how individual all his comedies are, whereas in Calderon the characters are always the same! We surrender entirely to the magic of Oberon and Titania in our memories. R. works. At lunch he looks somewhat run down. The weather is fine; we walk in the garden.
Jouk. brings a Flower Maiden; the costume problem worries me a little. The score of Der Freischütz is lying on the piano, and R. says, “I have just brought it out to show you who my master was,” and he shows me the two orchestral bars preceding Agathe’s “Wie nahte mir der Schlummer” aria, the wide spread of the wind instruments. “He was the first to write like that; it occurs in others in flashes, but with him it was deliberate.”
Toward 5 o’clock, conference with the management committee. After the men have been together for a while, R. comes to fetch me, telling me that he does not know what to say to them. We discuss the building of the King’s box, copyists, and also the subject of N. Planer, which makes R. smile incredulously at his first wife for finding it in her heart to conceal from her daughter that she was her mother. Afterward we joke about how he dislikes being with other people in my absence. I tell him it is because he does not like talking nonsense, which I can do so well. We recall the times in Munich when he was always sending for me, and I often could not come. “Altogether the idea of me without you—that would be a nice thing!”
In the evening, thinking of the Calderon play, he reads the canto in the Odyssey about Aeolus and Circe. Glorious impression: when the sacred valleys are described in which Hermes appears to the hero, R. remarks, “How sublime it is! And however great the sorrowing and suffering. Nature itself always objective, always sacred.” With a final laugh about Bottom from R. in bed, we bid the day farewell.