Wednesday, November 30:
R. had a good night, but he feels tired after his bath. At breakfast he comes back gaily to the quotation about the Jews: “Really - your father a Jew-baiter!” But the word “popularity” seems to him inappropriate for Meyerbeer - one might have said “celebrity,” but not “popularity”; Weber was popular, he says.
We search around for popular figures; he names Garibaldi, Napoleon I with his little hat, which he copied from Frederick the Great. The question whether it is possible for a true genius to grow fat is also discussed: “Not if he is well born, from the aristocracy,” R. feels. We go on to the unpopular Caesar, recall Shakespeare’s Caesar, agitated, angry, and bombastic at the same time, thoroughly unsympathetic, whereas Mark Antony’s torrent of sentiment makes him seem like a god.
Shakespeare reminds us that we thought yesterday of his “deliver them like a man of this world”; R. fetches the book and reads aloud the report of Henry IV’s death. Then he goes to his work, while I drive with the children to the Grotta della Regina. Before lunch R. tells me he is now writing “I am shorter, thou art longer” in the meadow, between horn and oboe in the orchestra (here he is recalling the poem by Walther von der Vogelweide which Lusch recited to him in Tribschen).
But at table he complains about the “horrible tales of violence” which demand “an utter concentration of ecstasy” - he had already forsworn it in Tristan. We come to the subject of anger, and when I remark that, confronted with an angry person, I always feel almost ashamed of my coolness, he says jokingly: “Nothing breeds gentleness more than living with an angry person. Minna, for example - her eternal state of agitation made me completely calm, and she once told me that nothing had ever passionate intrude me; deep inside I was quite unmoved, so that I could say coolly to myself, ‘This is something you have simply to put up with.’” Then he says, “With you it happens ever more rarely, but when it comes, then it is the end of everything, even of life itself.”
Typical of his outlook is what he says to me: “The people who stay away from me vanish from my mind, they have their own destiny independent of mine, like Joukowsky” (he stayed behind in Germany on account of the costumes) “and also Lusch.” News from London about the Neumann affair is more unpleasant than otherwise.
At three o’clock R. and I visit a villa close to the Favorita; the air, the countryside continue to delight us, R. feels decidedly well here. He is also working regularly. In the evening he reads to us the second act and half of the third act of Richard III, and that is already too much for our way of reading it and the impression every detail makes on us.
The introduction of the news of Clarence’s death after the meaningless reconciliation, made touching by the King’s condition, the Queen’s shattering exclamation, and the portrayal of the pleading Stanley which brings Edward to pour out his suffering: “That is a tragedy in itself,” says R. Then Hastings dying: “Wise art thou again in dying,” one can say of all Shakespeare’s characters.
When supper was finished, R. got up and played Italian melodies, mainly by Bellini (Pirata, Lucia, Sonnambula), saying that this music, in freeing itself from Rossini’s ornate style, enabled the heart to speak, and it was all suffering and lament. Then he comes to talk of Schröder-Devrient, how fine she had been as Romeo; she did not appear in helmet and armor, as she had been seen up till then, but in a coat of mail, and her blond hair had looked so beautiful; it also made a fine impression when she was Lucrezia and D. Anna.
He recently talked about ninths and their significance, saying how trivial the ensemble theme in the finale of Der Freischütz would be without them. Boni told us that, when she was looking for gloves for me in a shop and chose a pair on the spot, she was told to take them all away without paying, since our name is so well known!