Wednesday, January 17:
R. tells me that when he woke up during the night, he thought once more about the conjuration of the poodle in Faust, with increased admiration. Today he reads B. Forster's little pamphlet, noting that some authors just throw out ideas — as he does about Bach and the German language — but that others make something firm and inalienable out of it. He is also pleased with some, e.g., that the stronghold of Valhalla has turned into the Temple of the Grail.
Since the sun is shining, we ride in an open gondola via the Cannaregio into the open sea, and from there to the Rialto, where we get out. Since R. was on the verge of a spasm, he would have found the walk home difficult if he had not been distracted by everything he saw along the way — two men, for example, talking to each other, one of them standing motionless wearing a large round hat, a cycling cape, around his waist an apron of blue rags stitched together, black-bearded; the other gray, beardless, with a yellow-brown jacket, trousers, and cap, violently gesticulating. Animals form the main topic of our lunchtime conversation.
As we turned into the Cannaregio in our gondola, we wondered why the Germans made the sun feminine. "That is a tremendous compliment to the female character," R. says. "They regarded the moon as a footpad, stealing around all night by himself." He is indisposed today and has no massage. Dr. Keppler provides him with food for thought; he finds him quite pleasant but feels he has no eyes in his head — there are people who are just specialists, he says, otherwise not human beings at all.
Jouk. has brought me his father's biography in connection with the jubilee; I get Loldi to read it to me. R. comes in and says he could have spent a long time watching us both, mother and daughter. Over coffee we listen to Lusch and Jouk. telling various stories about society life. R. exclaims, "Why is it always women who get talked about? Never men!"
He plays the piano in the evening (yesterday, something from Die Walküre and the introduction to the third act of Die Meistersinger, vexed with both the piano and his own clumsiness). I recall that music usually seems to produce ill-humour or irritability in him, and I speak to him about it, pointing out how much more tranquil his mood is when he has been occupying himself with books. He says I am talking in a casual tone about something of great importance, but I am right; then he pleases me by declaring that he will be quite satisfied with the ten performances. Today he goes so far as to ask himself whether the whole thing should not be given up entirely and he should instead try to make as much money as possible, so that we could live independently! (He feels that Herr Neumann will probably be obliged to give up, too, and he wonders whether in the present circumstances V. & B. will pay him.)
Then he goes through our disloyal friendships — Nietzsche, Gersdorff — and feels we should be downright ashamed of not having been able to keep a better grip on them. And, no doubt telling himself inwardly that they were not people of his sort anyway, he sings, "Cilie! There's a huge mask-thing in your bed!"
At the recent concert in which the Tannhäuser Overture was played, the programme compared it — as a mark of the highest praise — to the Guillaume Tell Overture; this produces from R. the remark that everything the Italians, Rossini in particular, provide in the way of ensembles, choruses, etc., is terribly vulgar, but that is not so with the French, and he agrees with me when I say that the French are more civilized. We end the evening with scenes from [Schiller's] Don Carlos, the end of the first and beginning of the second acts, and R. says it is a joy to observe all the subtleties and master strokes in these youthful works.