Wednesday, April 6:
Fidi 10 months old today. Letter from Herr Horawitz in Vienna, saying the 6th performance of Die Meistersinger had taken place and went very well. Nothing from Berlin except an abusive article, sent on to us in malice. The children in the garden, then to their dancing lesson.
Countess Bassenheim seems to have gathered from the newspapers that the performance in Berlin went badly. In the evening a quotation brings our conversation around to the prison scene in Faust. “This staying in one spot, this refusal to move, a sign of madness, appears in Gretchen in order to separate her from Faust and to enable her to become his redemptress. What in the saints is produced by higher knowledge is shown here as a pathological factor.” Afterward read the Symposium until midnight; one of the deepest impressions of my whole life, as if I had seen the original beauty of which Diotima speaks. Tears of ravishment fill our eyes at the end of this wonderful poem.