Sunday, March 5:
In the morning R. talks at length about the Treaty of Passarowitz. The name Bazarov brought it to mind. Much gaiety, and I thank God for it. We discuss the affair of the Vdng translation (the English one) - Forman’s is being very severely criticized; we have to admit that all these things seem to us of very little account. And even our great hopes with regard to a furnished palazzo in Venice, now dashed by a letter from Dr. Keppler, are taken by R. more calmly than he himself expected. However, he is tired from our stay here; the weather is wet, his spasms return. But in the middle of one I hear him laughing loudly, for a herd of sheep comes along, led by a donkey, seeking shelter from the rain. We drive into town with Siegfried, but he looks very pale and is weak and run down, which worries R. After supper R. plays the new melody, which he has altered a little, and can I permit myself to say that in it I see the present state of my soul fully reflected? I should not dare, were I not to feel that the yearning gaze of a worm seems to bear some relationship to the shining blessings of a star.
In the evening, in the presence of some acquaintances, R. gets Rub. to play the first movement of 106, and he takes tremendous delight in it, kissing me as it is being played and then telling me he was pleased by the way I was listening. After that the Flying Dutchman Overture is played; R. at first makes jokes about it, saying it depicts Garibaldi’s entrance into Sicily, the King’s prayer, the retreat of the Neapolitan fleet, but then he gives advice on the tempi and himself plays the ballad very beautifully. But later he complains how little has been learned about the execution of his works. When we are alone together, he remarks how right Schopenhauer was to say that anyone who could reproduce music in words would solve the secret of the world; and he cites the Butterfly Scherzo (E Minor Quartet) with its “Peasants’ Dance” - who could explain that? Previously he had gone into actual rhapsodies about the wonderful concision of the first movement of 106, at the same time complaining that the Andante is too long. He regrets the unchanged repeat, when Beethoven was capable of so much in the variation form. He sees something of this error of length even in the Funeral March of the Eroica, whereas elsewhere in his works it is the brevity which is always so wonderful. At supper he told us very emphatically that he would have to make cuts in the third act of Tannhäuser, since no one will ever again do it in the way Schnorr did and even then it was so shattering that it went beyond what one should be allowed to experience on stage. Also in the second act, where the artificial metaphysical wit, though always full of emotion, cannot be followed by a large audience. “I permitted myself that in Lucerne, at a time when I had nothing.” “I love you very much - that is what I wanted to tell you!” he says to me, raising himself up again in bed, and we drift off into the night.
Monday, March 6:
Since, contrary to R.’s expectations, the weather does not prove, but the reverse, and since he is feeling the after effects of last night, he is almost in despair, and an invitation to us both from the Grand Duke’s heir and his wife to call on them today makes him if possible even less inclined than usual for such things. He feels that the good people could have come to visit him, observes that it has never done him any good to take such a step, and declares that he is glad to be free of such acquaintanceships. At lunch he remarks that intercourse with other people, even the most amiable of them, is a torture to him, from which he extricates himself by becoming excited. When we are drinking our coffee alone, I tell him how completely I understand his feelings and how well I realize that with the children there is a need for meeting other people, whereas with us there is only one course: withdrawal. I go on to say that this does not make me bitter, all I am attempting to do each day is to procure tranquillity for him and a little activity for the children. I do not know what brings us from this to Christianity and the great Christian things, and how they express something which was completely alien to the ancient world - we call this the musical element. In the evening we finish Turgenev’s novel with great interest. R. says of Mme Odintzov that her trouble is that there is nothing in her. R. asked me the name of Parmenion’s son, the King of Macedonia who appears in [Spontini’s] Olimpie; he was thinking of Cassander, but we were led astray by naming Parmenion as his father. Yesterday he showed me in Fidi’s copy of Grube’s historical studies the pictures of Alexander the Great and Charlemagne, both as beautifully polished as Bruckmann’s picture of him. “That is today’s Jewish art - no longer any truthfulness, everything touched up.” When he learns that the translator of Parsifal is a Jew, he says, “In ten years we shall have no one left to deal with but Jews.”