Saturday, April 9:
As usual garden, embroidery, and composition. At lunch brought the conversation back to the Symposium. R. places this work above everything else: “In Shakespeare we see Nature as it is, here we have the artistic awareness of the benefactor added; what would the world know of redeeming beauty without Plato? And what human instinct can be seen in the fact that it is precisely Plato who has been preserved for us!”
As I go to lie down after lunch, I hear R. cry, “How happy I am!” R. shows me a wonderful poem he has received from an unknown man in Berlin, who tried thus to console himself for not having been able to get a ticket for the 2nd performance of Die Meistersinger.
[Written after the April 10 entry but marked “belongs to April 9.”] A year ago the elder children came to me here; I think they are happy, and that is the best thing; may they one day be able to use this happiness to their father’s advantage!
In the evening R. played a small passage from Tristan (A-flat major, second act) which so pierced my heart that I was quite unable to write a short note (to Porges). “My heart bites me like the asp,” I said to R. “Yes,” he said, “the Symposium. I, too, thought today of Tristan and the Symposium. In Tristan it is also Eros who holds sway, and what in the one is philosophy is music in the other.” I had to admit to him that, when I heard his music, everything in life which occupied me, indeed, deeply worried and upset me, was suddenly swept away “like daytime ghosts,” like bad and empty dreams, and I had but one feeling: to him, to him!