Monday, June 19:
R. slept well, even if he now wakes up between 4 and 5 every morning. The weather is gray, and thoughts of his relations with Herr Batz are not calculated to cheer him up. At times he comes very close to the idea of fleeing from all this senseless muddle. At lunch he jokingly described to Loldi how he could see himself with her on a desert island, with dogs instead of people; a cow would plead with her to milk it, which she would do; now and again one would see a sinking ship, bringing a letter from Eva, for Eva would give her letters only to sinking ships, these being the only ones which ever saw the island.
In the morning he strained himself trying to move his big dressing chair by himself, and he has to miss his preparations with the conductor. He reads Hume and is very taken with Henry V; he intends to look at Shakespeare again to find out why we find him so unsympathetic there. He thinks it may be because of our feelings for the “genius” Falstaff. At lunch he talks about Die Zauberflöte and remarks how seldom-except perhaps in the choruses-the music is superior to the text, and that is what is so nice about it. Then the case of Herr Vogl is discussed, along with his various achievements; in the course of the conversation R. calls him an “ironical court clerk” and talks of his policeman’s sarcasm. Over coffee he reads a nice letter from Herr Scaria, whose participation pleased him; but when Herr Neumann is ironically referred to in the letter as “Herr Ehrenmann” [“man of honor”], R. says he stands outside all these things like [not completed], and he relates Richter’s anecdote of the conductor Proch, who was always anxious to get things over with, and who, after the last word of the dialogue (“Rogue!”) and the shot, immediately launched the orchestra on the elegiac melody about the clouds which cover the sun. R. also talks about the orchestration of Tristan und Isolde, which he thinks decidedly too rich in the second act, particularly for the very insignificant singers of today.
Around 4 o’clock R. and I drive up to the theater in the strapontin, which always pleases him; costume session, which can be divided into three stages: (1) horror; (2) absurd comicality of the figures demonstrating the things to us; (3) earnest and worried efforts to alter them! However, in the end I feel we shall be able to save the day. But, oh, our feelings of having been let down! On our return home, when R. and I are alone, he has much to say on this subject! In the evening R. is very tired; we have some music, and Herr Humperdinck plays a pretty song of his own, the only thing to criticize being the tremendous amount of modulation underlying a fairly unremarkable theme. R. and I agree that, just as Rossini foretold riches for the man who 50 years hence would invent the stagecoach, so it would be for the man who one day would revive Liszt’s wilde Jagd or even Der Dorfbarbier! The American March is played, R. remarks that it was badly done, but once again it pleases me with its breadth and its fine popular flavor. “If I did it right, I should not be Tell,” R. says after trying to play a Beethoven quartet in an arrangement for piano duet and breaking off. We then recall our duets together in Tribschen and those lovely years of solitude.
In a copy of Cramer’s music encyclopedia dated 1783 R. read with interest the testimony regarding the 13-year-old Beethoven, of whom it was prophesied that he would become another Mozart; he remarks how greatly those times differed from our own in acuteness of judgment.