Sunday, January 21:
R. is skipping the massage on Sundays, and I beg him to give up the stomach tube entirely, believing that it must upset his nerves. He has arranged an outing for today; we are to have lunch in Saint Mark's Square, and, sure enough, Venice is enveloped in fog! Today he started his preface for Stein's book, and that puts him in a good mood. But it is cold, the meal is not ready in the Cappello Nero; I read aloud a nice letter from our dear Ponsch, and that helps, but the mood almost threatens to turn sour; however, since we are entirely by ourselves except for Jouk., R. does not become irritable, and gradually a very good atmosphere is achieved.
We wish to go home but are forced back by the crush, and from the restaurant we watch the masked procession, in which a cook keeps greeting R., and R. replies. It is estimated that there are 20,000 people in the square; the children — who went off at R.'s bidding but then returned — watch the seething crowds with us, "a black mass in which patches of flesh colour emerge," a strange, uncanny impression. As R. and I are riding home together, he talks about the sight and the impression, both so sad. "And yet," he says, "a person who does not try to make closer contact with the masses is not worth much!"
He goes to take a rest; I pay a call; when I go into his room on my return, he wakes up. In the evening he plays things by Weber, from Euryanthe and again, at my request, from Der Freischütz. We are pleased that after Beethoven such utterly new things should have been written, which in no way detract from Beethoven's greatness.
Herr v. Wolkoff visits us, quite a pleasure for R., and since he makes an apt remark about singers and orchestra (observing that voices and instruments do not mix), R. praises his accurate discernment and says that the orchestra should be the ground, as it were, on which the singer walks; tempted into it by this conversation, he sits down at the piano and plays and sings the scene in which Fafner confronts Siegfried, the awakening of Brünnhilde, then at my request the introduction to the third act of Tristan. But all of this upsets him; he talks in an absent-minded way and, meaning to tell us something about Dr. Rahn, forgets what he was about to say.
[Added in margin: "R. has severely apostrophized Herr Hausburg about his conduct, which he finds lamentable!"]