Monday, December 12:
Another restless night, but he is cheerful at breakfast. The name Mozart keeps us occupied (Muothart); R. thinks it sounds good, and he feels one should have formed Guiscard in the same way (Witzhart). “Mendelssohn should have called himself Handel’ssohn!” Goodness knows how we come to talk about Princess Wittg., but I say jokingly that I should like to have seen how two such characters as his and hers would get along together: “Not for four weeks could I have stood it,” he says, and drolly adds, “Ox and donkey fought one day to find out which of them was wisest; neither wavered nor gave way!”
At 12 o’clock we drive to Count Tasca’s palace; R. finds a potpourri from Die Meistersinger on the piano and plays some of it, then we view the rooms, richly ornamented with a childlike variation in taste. During our afternoon walk in the English Gardens R. complains about how his work absorbs him, and says he accepts to some extent what I said to him earlier, that he is growing more patient, for I cannot imagine how preoccupied he sometimes is, how an oboe can keep going through his head, etc. The walk gives us pleasure, as always, and we also recall the owl; R. laughs over the clarity of its call, as if it were learning to speak. Its ears remind us of Hermes, and we talk about the way in which the Greeks drew their motives directly from Nature.
He works; in the evening he seems to me somewhat agitated. He talks of his childhood, of Weber, of “Humpel-Marie” [Weber], of an oboist called Wusstlich who had a ladylove from whom R. heard that he had played under Weber and was reported to have died of consumption, news which had associated the oboe with tragedy in his mind forever afterward; of concerts in the Grosser Garten. The difference now - serious concerts! Then he talks about the Bach fugue, how, in connection with Mendelssohn’s performance of the Bach Passion, he had heard a musician in Leipzig say that Bach was a great mathematician but Handel had been more imaginative. He speaks of the Bach fugue as if it were a vanished species, compared with which the fugue in Sonata Opus 106, for example, is child’s play.
I am concerned at not being able to have him to myself, when I feel I could bring him peace. At supper he again became absorbed in reflections as to whether the sum of existence, which has already developed so nobly in some heads and even in some hearts, might not in fact have an ethical purpose, as has indeed been finely surmised. “Or are we really just here to eat grass? It’s possible.” And then he says a good person is to be prized above all else, but how rare they are! At breakfast yesterday we reflected on immortality, that is to say, living on in the memory of others, and how questionable this is, since even a being like Goethe was so vague and indeed almost conventional in his judgments of the deceased.