Thursday, March 2:
R. had a restless night, and he keeps returning to his dislike of our present house. In our early-morning conversation we come to Feustel’s speech, to the general question of growing fame: “It’s quite true,” R. says, “what one longs for in one’s youth one has more than enough of in one’s old age, but I can’t say that I ever longed for fame - rather, for something that was different, a genuine melody of my own, something that was not Beethoven or Weber. From the beginning I composed for effect, never got myself immersed in meditation or brooding like Schumann.”
He is reading a second Turgenev novel, A House of Gentlefolk, with interest. He strolls up and down for a while on the terrace and in the little garden, then I hear him improvising downstairs. He writes down a melody, then shows it to me, saying that he has at last found the line he was looking for. He plays it to me and calls it an antidote - he had been reading my father’s Mephisto-Walzer, and we agree that silence is our only proper response to so dismal a production. But I feel this apparition as a sort of renewed blessing on my existence - perhaps I might call it a reward for never having allowed my hopes to diminish - these sounds blossom before me like a water lily rooted in the depths of our being - how, dear God, shall I thank Thee?
After having read the first act of Götz von Berlichingen to Fidchen, I continue in the evening reading Fathers and Sons to R. and the girls.