Saturday, August 13:
The weather, and observations of external happenings - among them the Berlin Congress and its treatment of the Oriental problem - arouse in us thoughts of a complete withdrawal from everything after the production of Parsifal. “To depart like Lycurgus,” says R., “and then see what they make of my ideas.” In the afternoon he stands at the glass door of the salon and considers whether it would be right to tear the children away from their roots. At lunch much about the climate, but he is busy with his work, with which he is thoroughly pleased.
In the evening our friend Cyriax; in his cheerful, frank way R. asks him about his income from his business, and thinks it rather small. Then we talk about large cities, and R. disputes that poverty is easier to bear in Paris than in London. In the evening the Pastoral played by Rub.; R. says one must take care not to fall into emotional accents with it. Here and there in the first movement he exclaims, “That is done with a cadence.” He deplores the repeats, which make it all sound insignificant, and finds the whole thing has something of the spirit of eighteenth-century bergerie. At one point he quotes Polonius: “Pastoral, pastoral, comical, tragical-comical-pastoral.” When I tell him afterward that the piano often sounds very painfully thin to me, he says, “Oh, how we think the same in everything, it is terrible!” He is becoming more and more averse to associations. (He has rejected the contract with Frankfurt.) A letter from Herr Vogl about the role of Kundry for his wife reminds R. all too clearly of the whole dreary theatrical scene, and he bemoans having to work with such vain people. He says that after Parsifal he will write nothing but symphonies.