Monday, April 18:
Very bad night, I have to call R. and spend the day in bed on account of a kind of sore throat. In the A.A.Z. a correspondent’s report from Berlin (Julius Cohen Rodenberg) about Die Meistersinger, it pokes fun at the applauding “blond Germans,” depicts the composer as a monster, but praises the work itself. — (Yesterday R. drew for me with a pencil the scenery for his Götterdämmerung.) — R. brings a letter from the poet Hans Herrig, who seems to be full of R.’s ideas to the point of obsession. R. had asked for his address in an advertisement in the Norddeutsche Allgemeine. He relates with indignation that at the 3rd performance cuts had already been introduced; R. writes to Eckert about them. R. has his meals with me; he talks of many model performances he brought about in small towns and says [Wilhelmine] Schröder-Devrient once humorously remarked that Reissiger would have to put in for an extra allowance for gymnastics lessons; since R. was constantly jumping on to the stage from the orchestra to lend a hand, Reissiger wanted to do the same, but could not manage it, hence the need for gymnastics lessons. — While R. is eating with me, he recalls my confinement and weeps, describing his condition and then his happiness. — Reverting to Die Meistersinger in Berlin, he says, “It is still just as I said to Hans in Munich on his birthday: we shall attain success only if we renounce all pleasure in it.”
I tell him I have written to Judith and told her how offended I was to see Lohengrin praised in a paper so full of shameful stories. R.: “I wonder if she will understand? She has such good and deep qualities, but they are all such fragmented entities. You are the only complete person I have ever met, you are even more complete than I am”—which of course made me laugh. In the evening read Henry IV.