Saturday, December 10:
R. had a good night, and at breakfast we continue our conversation about Kant and his theme of seeds dying out. He works; I go with the children to look for photographs for friends in Bayr. At lunch he is pleased that the Rhine wine has at last arrived. Afterwards we drive to La Cuba, then to La Zisa, and finally we alight in the Florio Gardens, which are very beautiful and in which a magnificent owl arouses admiration in R. and all the rest of us. “That is Nature,” R. exclaims in the evening, “without disguise, terrible but truthful; and that fellow looked like a lion - more beautiful than a lion.” We spend a long time looking at it, and return to it after the charming gardens have greatly refreshed our spirits. The town pleases him more and more; its division by the two great arteries as a means of controlling the confusion of the narrow streets seems to him completely right, and it gives great delight to see the sea through Porta Nuova across the roofs of the town.
In the evening he loses his temper again, this time in connection with the theater fire in Vienna, about which he was asked. He replies that the most useless people frequented such an opera house; if poor workers are buried in a coal mine, that both moves and angers him, but a case like this scarcely affects him at all. Then he comes back to the subject of the army, saying he would like to have Siegfried spared from military service; when someone says that soldiers die for glory, he exclaims: “Because they are more afraid of their sergeants than of bullets - a bullet is something merciful. Ask yourself whether the soldiers at Spicheren died for glory.” When he exclaims at the end of the evening yesterday how terrifying the world is, I tell him that I dearly wish to preserve some happiness for my children, and for that reason frequently keep silent about my feelings; he says I am right.
He reads The Hostage to us, vexed to find Moros called Damon; he finds it not as good as The Diver and remarks that Schiller did not properly understand crucifixion, confusing it with the gallows; the significant point of crucifixion was the slowness of the agony. Then The Journey to the Forge; he thinks the dialogue between Robert and the Count too dramatic, Othello-like, but everything else pleases and moves both him and us, especially the description of the Mass going on in all its ceremony while the horrible deed is being done - “A glorious spirit is speaking here” - and he finds delight in the beautiful expression on S.’s face as he listens.
In the morning he was pleased by Kant’s word constructions - “das Anarten” [“assimilation”], for example - whereas nowadays new constructions amount to a depreciation, are simply nonsense. The sun comes out, but it soon has to give way, and the day remains overcast most of the time, though two rainbows are to be seen. Before lunch, when I go to greet him, he is still erasing the lines he ruled wrongly in Siena. At lunch our landlord visits us; he is a butterfly collector, and he really shocks us with the news that whole species of butterflies have been wiped out by widespread collecting. No outing beyond a short turn in the garden for R. In the evening he works again, but he is so tired that he has to take a short nap after supper. The concentration and exertion of his work are proving a strain on him. I suggest reading Goethe again, and this gives him pleasure, except for a description of temples. He finds this very boring: “It’s life we want.” The expression “Schrittstein” for “Trottoir” [“pavement, sidewalk”] pleases him. When we are alone together - after he has encouraged young Tiirk, Siegfried’s tutor, to regard our stay here with a bit more enjoyment - I tell him that I can well understand what he said yesterday, that in Parsifal he will have none of the “polyphonic playing about” which he used in the Nibelungen - the “Forest Murmurs,” for instance. It is all too solemn, he says, too concentrated, there is none of the luxuriating in suffering that there is in Tristan. He continues: “God, when one thinks how I started, a Magdeburg conductor with 4 first violins, what a joy it is to write for 12 and to do oneself justice! I went furthest in the Ring, in order to reproduce effects of Nature.” The news of the success also of the 2nd Tristan performance astonishes him: “Things must really have changed a lot there if that pleases them.” But he would like to make some cuts in it, and recently he said he felt his orchestration was too heavy (2nd act).
He still complains a lot about his work: “If only I could write something like the A major symphony! I should not have Beethoven’s lovely ideas, but the work involved would be nowhere near as much as I am now doing.”