Sunday, December 18:
R. again has a chest spasm. We discuss the possible cause of these and agree that it is his work which puts such a strain on him and disturbs all his functions. I implore him not to strain himself by hastening its completion.
At breakfast he is cheerful again, compares me with some pope or other, then with Friedrich III. On the performance of Nathan der Weise, at which, when the line asserting that Christ was also a Jew was spoken, an Israelite in the audience cried “Bravo,” he reproaches Lessing for this piece of insipidity, and when I reply that the play seems to me to contain a peculiarly German kind of humanity, he says, “But not a trace of profundity.” He recalls Bernays, who accused Holtzmann of having no regard for Lessing. “One adds fuel to these fellows’ arrogance by having anything at all to do with them, and we, for example, do not talk of our feelings about those Jews in the theater in front of Rub., 400 unbaptized and probably 500 baptized ones.” He makes a drastic joke to the effect that all Jews should be burned at a performance of Nathan der Weise.
At lunch he talks about the story of the blessing Jacob won by trickery, saying that this is just how things are. I: “More or less: ‘le ciel souffre la violence’ [‘the heavens tolerate violence’].” He: “And La devoción de la cruz - Calderon’s - the magnificent result of it.”
Sunshine. We drive down to the sea and through the Porta Nuova, still deep in conversation. But after his evening work he is worn out. The Vliegende Bl. takes his mind off it, but the Bayr. Bl. - an article on Kleist by Wolz., which I suggest we read - arouses his anger. He says one knows all Kleist’s mental struggles by heart; they were those of an adolescent schoolboy. What is this striving for truth supposed to mean? One is truthful, and that’s that. The bombastic style, “Corsican Imperator,” he also finds unpleasant, and he calls the whole thing green. The statement concerning the performance of Parsifal also seems to him lacking in dignity: “I should have put that slightly differently.”
Rub. asks him various questions in connection with his piano score, and this leads him to show us his last page and its orchestration of the spear-worship. He says, “Here I have done something which will earn me praise even from my wife,” and, further, “For Parsifal’s entrance I have horns and trumpets; horns alone would have been too soft, not ceremonious enough, trumpets alone too clattery, brassy - such things one must go in search of, and then I expect people to play them well.” He persists in maintaining that he orchestrated too heavily in Tristan. When I say that we had certainly not noticed that with Schnorr, he replies, “At that time my mind was on other things.”
When we are alone, I say to him, “Tristan and Parsifal, one dies because of his will to live, the other lives because of his dying will.” R.: “You must always have a motive then”; after a pause, “Parsifal sees Tristan” (in Amfortas), and, after another pause, “Something has come between them - the blood of Christ.”