Saturday, March 25:
Yesterday we talked about the sonata form, agreeing that even in 111, for example, Beethoven still shows a certain stiffness in the first movement which does not quite match the freedom of the concluding movement. In this connection, R. says, he acknowledges only the A major Sonata, which is utterly free, and the first movement of 106, which is certainly highly organized, but in which the richness demands this kind of organization; otherwise no sonata gives him what individual works by Bach can give him.
He slept well. At breakfast I tell him what Stein has written to me about the coal industry being replaced by electricity; he argues strongly against it. “It is still a machine,” he exclaims, and tells me what crippling conditions have been brought about by machines. No, no improvements of this sort, but moving to fine climates in which one can live naturally. He then reads, first of all The Tempest, then Stein’s essay on Rousseau, with which he is so impressed that he writes to Stein, bringing up again his old ideas for an educational institution; he wants to print an appeal in the Blatter and see whether he might not be entrusted with about six boys, who would enjoy a free education under Stein’s direction.
A very great storm brings up the subject of the sea’s erosions - every year estates worth 8 billion are being lost. Otherwise it is The Tempest which claims precedence in R.’s thoughts; he says he is only now beginning entirely to understand certain beauties in its composition. In the evening he goes to the piano again and to begin with plays the opening of the Freischütz Overture; this always opens our hearts, and I say to him how much vitality the art of music must possess if, so soon after Beethoven, something as novel as this could still be discovered. “Oh,” he says, “Beethoven was in the ninth Heaven, and this was a return to Nature.”
He remarked today on our (the German) aptitude for ideality, our return from beautiful Italy to Munich - so ugly, cold, and raw; but then one enters a hall - sometimes itself very ugly - and the music begins! He says that for this reason, as far as we are concerned, all is lost if music is put to the wrong use. In the afternoon, over a glass of beer, he looks at an English illustrated periodical and shows me a picture of starvation in India, served up as entertainment for the readers!
In the evening some whist, during which R. jokes a lot with Count Gr., telling him he will surely take him for a fou [madman] and find it difficult to believe that he ever wrote Lohengrin. Then he says that if he had to talk French for the next ten years, he would be dead in five.
Today I again find occasion to call him the “children’s friend”; he then jokingly recalls the children’s book of that name, which showed a boy with his hair brushed upright bringing in a cake - it was this boy with whom his mother compared him.