Tuesday, August 2:
Resuming our discussion from yesterday, R. says, “Need is the spur to activity; if the spur is of an ideal kind, it soon yields to insight, and activity continues, as it were, just as a means of sustaining existence, since we lack a community of noble beings.” When I tell him that a statement by an eminent personality, however bold it may be, fascinates me, since it shows how a great man helps himself through life, he says to me, “You have got much further with all these questions than I have,” and all day long he teases me about it, saying I get gooseflesh whenever he has a constructive thought, and that I do not believe in the art of the future.
I make an awful error: when giving the pages of the score to Herr Humperdinck, I wrap them in one of the prepared sheets. R. is quite beside himself with rage. We do in fact get the page back immediately, but he has lost half an hour and is very angry. However, afterward he is infinitely kind, regrets having been so vehement toward me, while I am disconsolate about my carelessness.
At lunch friend Porges irritates him, though without actually having said much, but R. assumes him to be a supporter of Schelling. When a man like Kant expresses a great thought, he declares heatedly, it falls into the hands of charlatans; and to pay attention to these is to show oneself incapable of understanding the original thought. He leaves the room during coffee but soon returns, and the conversation proceeds more calmly. Toward evening, when we return to it, we discuss the subject of supporters: one can share in sanctity, but can one in genius? Very questionable. Schopenhauer’s true supporter is R., who went his own way, was himself productive, and could have given Sch. at least as much as he took from him.
In the garden R. recalled the Suleika songs and the fine manner in which Tichatschek sang them, and he goes through some of the songs. In “Wer nie sein Brot” he points out to us how impossible it is for music to illumine a word like Brot [bread], and he declares that the whole of lyric poetry is an absurdity, and no poem can be set to music; it is the task of music to enter at the point where words at their most expansive become action. When “Die Forelle” is mentioned, he says, “Schumann no doubt composed the herring!” In Schubert he is often disturbed by the prosody.
We go on to Tristan. R. plays to us the Prelude and part of the first act, up to the second conversation with Brangäne. He says he gets more pleasure out of accompanying himself in this way, and these are divine moments for us. The furnishing of Stein’s room at Jouk.’s brings us to the subject of the visual arts in the 15th century and the miraculous emergence of whole generations who saw and reproduced things in this way. R. feels there is something similar in the dramatic literature of Spain, but probably Italian painting was more significant.
About the climate in Bayreuth R. improvises the following verse, written in the diaries in Wagner’s own handwriting:
Upper Franconia, children, may have a horrible winter;
however, the summer there is much more terrible.
RW.