Tuesday, August 29:
R. had a very agitated night. Returning home from farewell walks, I find him unwell. But he is very pleased that Frl. Malten has arrived, responding to his invitation to attend the performance. We have a final lunch with my father, which leads to much expansiveness between R. and my father! At 4 o’clock I drive with my father to the theater. Frl. Malten and Herr Siehr watch the performance from my box, “heaping coals of fire on the heads of the others,” as R. says when he appears during the intermission between Acts I and II.
Unfortunately he is put into a very bad mood when the Grand Duke passes through his salon and one of the princely ladies enters it! Everything on stage satisfies him, however, and in the third act, after the transformation music, he takes the baton himself and conducts to the end! Then from the orchestra he says farewell to his artists, after a storm of applause which threatens never to end. Not many of his words could be heard in the auditorium, and he himself tells me that he never knows what he has said. Once, he says, he succeeded in writing down what he had said for the King, and he believes fairly accurately — that was after the dress rehearsal of T. und I. But for several years now he has no longer been able to recollect his words.
Our drive home is quiet and solemn, I observe that we can be grateful, even if the achievement was bought at great cost and meant the sacrifice of almost our entire domestic tranquillity. But without a doubt such activity is a necessity for R., and the right thing for him in spite of all difficulties. Late in the evening we talk with the children about what we have just been experiencing, and it is remarked how differently the orchestra played under his direction, how incomparably different Herr Reichmann was as he sang his “Sterben, eine Gnade!” I tell how I discovered Papa drinking grog in his dressing room with the conductor, while some of the Flower Maidens were waiting outside to see him once more. Unfortunately the news of my father’s departure tomorrow produces a great outburst of anger.