Wednesday, August 10:
Weather still dull, and R. has a chest spasm! I read to him a letter from Malwida and discourage him from talking. Then I set out for the Eremitage with poor friend Rubinstein, who has once again lost his composure, and listen to his laments.
R., to whom I relate this on our return, is astonished and jokes about it, properly pulling my leg about it in fact, but he agrees with me that at times there is nothing else one can do, though he says that to an onlooker it seems curious and extravagant. When I compare myself with Jungfer Ziss, he says, “Today it was more like Catherine of Siena!” He thinks I am looking well, and when Dr. Landgraf says the same thing, he remarks that it is because of my good deeds. Alas, if only it were possible to help by showing a willingness to do so!
Much with Stein yesterday and today about Siegfried’s education. In the evening merry chat with our friends, he advises Rub. to get married; at lunch he said to us: “The second theme in the Euryanthe Overture,” and plays another one by Marschner, so similar that we have to laugh heartily, saying it is probably the result of “training.” We talk of opera: “All the same,” says R., “one feels a sort of pitying respect for it when one sees what has been achieved in this absurd genre.”
While we are teasing Stein over the fact that he is about to be made a professor, R. says it is perhaps not a bad thing to have to go through this in a place like Halle. “In the same way,” he says, “I had to go through the complete career of an opera conductor. And when one looks back on it later, one tells oneself that nothing could have been different from the way in which one experienced it.” Talking of the war and the peace treaty of 1871, R. said, “It is impossible to be too cynical about how heads of state play around with the destiny of whole nations.” When Jouk. told us that Herr v. Weber had not once looked at him, R. joked, “I should have introduced you as ‘Jouk., who did not educate Tsar Alexander III.’” Recently, when R. mentioned the pipes of the Prussian military band, he observed that there was something utterly wild about them: “But to these gentlemen it is all the same whether they look like grand moguls or whatever.”