Friday, March 24:
R. slept well, and he rises in cheerful spirits. This reminds me that he told me his mother once called him the “children’s friend” (saying he looked like the “children’s friend”).
Around noon he tells me that he has been looking again through C. Frantz’s “Open Letter” to him, and he reads some of it to me, including the excellent passage on Faust, and we once again come to the conclusion that he is outstanding as a critic, but questionable when it comes to creative work. Then he goes to the piano, plays the Valhalla theme, which he thinks well described by Wolz. as “architectural”; he thinks of Das Rheingold with pleasure, also the performance of it in Berlin, and agrees with me when I say that music can make an impression in the memory as great as when one is actually hearing it. He also tells me that today he composed a true popular song, but he has forgotten it.
We are nine at table for lunch, our conversation half in German, half in Italian, half in French. R. decides on an outing. When we part and he goes off for a rest, I hear him exclaim loudly, “Alas!” I go in to ask him about it, and he tells me, “I was wondering when we - you and I - would be in that other world to which we belong; there is nothing for us in this one - it was there just to produce us both.”
Ah, how blissful is my feeling that life can give us nothing! Nor can it harm us. . . . After our little concert in Porrazzi I went upstairs to speak to Blandine about her future; after a while Daniela came in and told me that they, the children, had had such a fine conversation with their father downstairs. And I learned that he had spoken about me, even about my appearance, in fact; and he himself hints jokingly about it to me. I, however, feel the ecstasies of eternity; to have the image of myself planted in the children’s hearts by him! It will live in their hearts as the image of our love.
A peaceful evening; the six children play and chat, R. plays some Beethoven themes to start with, among others from the Adagio of the 9th Symphony, and he says, “To discover these two themes and to combine them, the one like a dream of Nature, the other like a fair memory, to produce something so divine - only a madman could do that, a person of sound mind could never find such things.” Then he reads The Tempest and talks to me about the wonderful things in it, also about the peculiar vitality of Prospero’s character, the fullness of his first scene with Ariel. R. also remarks on the way Prospero makes the young prince chop wood, and we immerse ourselves in this wonderful creation.