Thursday, December 1:
R. slept well. At breakfast he entertains us with his account of how the wig is snatched from Princess N.’s head, and he seizes the opportunity to enlarge upon the dreadfulness of wigs, all the things that are needed to produce this white mass of hair, and what an uncanny effect they always had on him.
Then we come on to Richard III; R. remarks on the sudden violence at the council meeting: “The people cannot really believe that in that moment in the garden his arm withered, but the terror has been spread, and one can picture the two of them, Buckingham and Gloster, laughing uproariously.” Well drawn Clarence’s children are, too.
Then R. is amused by the cries in the street. Little as he cares for Italian chatter, all the more is he amused by the cries, and by Schn.’s remark that for the sake of the olives a man would make a noise as if he were offering the whole world for sale. Fidi tells us at lunch that yesterday the whole street gathered around him while he was drawing a church (San Domenico); this amuses R.
We then come back to Richard III; what particularly impressed me is the way the poet, in the midst of all the dreadful reality, shows his characters transfigured by suffering: Margaret becomes a sibyl; Elizabeth, with her “Welcome,” a heroine; Anne a penitent through her acknowledgment of guilt. R. says, “That is ideality.”
Over coffee I read that a further 30 million marks are to be spent on the army; R. says jokingly: “Germany is a beggar armed to the teeth. It is as well not to meet us in the street.” He is constantly being annoyed by the newspaper reports on Parsifal, more or less suggesting that he said the same things about the Nibelungen as well. He talks of publishing something about it; I advise him against it.
It is raining; he goes out after his siesta to the bookshop, and he tells me that when he got there, he could no longer remember what he was looking for: “Renan? Cosima is ordering that.” Finally Jacolliot, of whom they had never heard. But he was attracted by some relief maps, which he much likes: “Everywhere one feels as if one were there and settling in.” He is repelled by the rococo Church of San Domenico and the pillar of the saint: “That’s what the Renaissance led to.”
I observe that there is no more cause to reproach it for that than to blame Palestrina’s music for the emergence of the operatic aria, but he holds to his opinion, saying that Greek art influenced the world long after its own downfall, but this eagerness to make things beautiful, to avoid harshness, resulted in rococo; in the core of things there was something corrupt. “Ideas such as Nietzsche’s have found their voice in Burckhardt, the Renaissance man: Erasmus, Petrarch, I hate them.”
At supper he talks about his page, saying he made a lot of writing mistakes. He arouses the children to merry laughter by describing the picture he keeps before his eyes to characterize the present-day world: “Fine horses, noble, eager, fiery, with them a good, hard-working, capable, earnest coachman, and inside the carriage, master of all these creatures, a bloated Jewish banker!”
We continue to speak of this world, and he says that never again can he bring himself to write another word about politics or even mention such a name as Bismarck [the last eight words obliterated in ink by an unknown hand]. On the other hand, he would enjoy dealing with a subject such as male and female - “like driving clouds in front of one.”
In the evening he reads to us up to the end of the fourth act; amid all the horrors and moving scenes we frequently have to laugh at all the wit and humor; the people who only hear when the recorder speaks! The scene with Buckingham’s “Give me some breath,” the exclamation about Richmond on the seas.
When Fidi says good night before the reading, R. says, “You are right, my boy, to go off to bed! And yet,” he adds afterward, “when I was his age, wild horses could not have dragged me away. God, how these things gripped me!” Later, when Fidi’s teacher praises his diligence, R. says, referring to his passion for architecture, “That is just how I want it - I should have no use for a composer son.”