Wednesday, August 3:
Again we do not have breakfast in the garden; R. complains about the wind and is vexed with the meteorological observations: changeable winds, showers. “Herodom” is being worked out in his mind, and once again he humorously reproaches me for not believing in the art of the future! He works, and since we are expecting our friend Stein, he writes a poem about him. Cordial general delight at this dear friend’s arrival in our home. Recollections of his first visit, now almost two years ago; in between, Italy.
R. is in a very cheerful mood. Among other things we talk about Berlin and mention that, when we were speaking yesterday about the present year, ’81, and Jouk. observed that he had not achieved much, I remonstrated; R.: “And I, if I had not run away from Neumann, I should have done nothing at all!” R. pursues his joke further: “Oh, heroism! Reason rails for putting up with things, but necessity compels.”
Over coffee R. chides me teasingly for listening to Porges’s readings on Tristan, and when I tell him I find it somewhat difficult to explain the concatenations to him, he interrupts me good-humoredly: “You know cuckoos? They have a habit of laying their eggs in strange nests, which elephants never do,” etc. Then exuberantly he goes on to my appearance, connects it with Porges’s reading, and comes out with one comic notion after another.
In the afternoon we drive to the Eremitage; he talks about Gobineau, India, the Orient in general: “It lives, is of priesthood comparable to the unshakable faith of the pariahs.” Supper in the garden by moonlight. “I am a happy man,” R. exclaims. In the salon we take up Tristan und Isolde again; he speaks and sings it up to the end of the first act. He feels he has been too drawn out in the confrontation between Tristan and Isolde, except when it is in the hands of really great actors; and to convince himself of it, he reads the scene between hero and heroine: “Neither will speak it or admit it until the moment of the embrace, when the whole moral world seems to collapse into ruins.”
When Molly comes into the salon, R. says that during the afternoon, as he was reflecting on and singing the allegro theme in the first movement of the A major symphony, the two dogs had leapt around him, licking him, as if saying, “What’s the matter with him?” He says many thoughts had come to him about this divine portrait of the world, the symphony.