Thursday, September 1:
R. had a good night’s rest and faces the day, apart from the bad weather, cheerfully. He works on his article and also on the score. In the latter he makes a small harmonic change in “holde süsse Mutter” and says, “One could spend a lifetime working on a thing like this.”
Our good Marianne Brandt does some studying in our house; R. turns to Handel, takes out the Ode for St. Cecilia’s Day and asks M. Br. to sing his favorite piece from it, “The soft complaining flute”; she does not know how to sing it and R. demonstrates it to her. He also plays the march from Judas Maccabaeus, which he likes enormously, and at supper he maintains that Handel must surely have composed “God Save the King”: “The fellow was a scoundrel, but a genius as well.”
His appearance reminds me somewhat of Rubens, and when I recognize elements of Beethoven in the march, it occurs to me that in his Battle of Vittoria Beethoven had no better model for the English character than Handel’s style, and the two then became identical.
Before lunch I was led to my room, and I laugh heartily on seeing that R. has had Egusquiza’s portrait painted with bad portraits of him; he also dislikes the Lenbach sketch; he says he does not know what to think of me! All in the gayest manner, and now the Spaniard has turned quite pink!
Today was R.’s Saxon day; he says, among other things, “When I sit here cackling at the piano...” And he talks of it to Siegfried, and he teaches Siegfried to whistle with him and to answer him!
In the afternoon, as we are strolling in the garden, he talks to me about his article, and in the evening he comes back to it, saying that he hopes to have developed Gobineau’s views to the extent that there may now be something even consoling about them, although he has accepted these views in their entirety.
In the evening he exclaims: “How little it speaks for human intelligence that they settle down in places with such climates and have beggars among them. What can one make of such a species?”
Mentioning the luxury he saw in Herr Fould’s house in Paris, he says, “Marble statues stand and gaze at me, yawning. Why have you been brought here?”