Sunday, June 18:
R. has a slight chest attack, but he decides not to pay much more attention to the diet, but to treat this complaint as a form of hiccups. Fortunately he is looking very well! He corrects his article, takes it to the neighboring house himself (a letter has arrived from Herr Schön, but he does not wish to read it, preferring his letter to be published without prejudice). Before lunch he sits in the garden, Siegfried and Eva join him there, and he tells me he has been enjoying a wonderful ten minutes; a bit of sunshine makes one unutterably grateful, he says, and one would be content with the tiniest scrap of earth. Over coffee he delights in the blue wallpaper in the salon, the coats of arms, and he thanks Jouk. for the former. The costumier from Frankfurt, Herr Schwab, is here, also Fritz Brandt, and so we set out on a drive to the theater via the Eremitage with the entire art of the future. R. is very merry. On stage he climbs right up to the rigging loft and tries out the tom-tom (which he calls the “Adam-Dam”). But already the sky is clouding over!...
In the evening I put on the Kundry costume, which does not entirely come up to our expectations. Our conversation turns to music, and R. points out how much finer and nobler-never mind that the whole idea came from Rossini-the prayer in Moses is than the unisono conspiracy chorus in Les Huguenots. When everybody has gone, I read to R. my draft of the letter to the mayor which R. asked me to write; he thinks it good. Talking about his work yesterday, he said he now leaves so much out; to hear the peacock calling is enough to distract him (the peacock’s call gives him great delight-he said recently that he felt as if he had been transported to India).