Tuesday, May 10:
Terrible boardinghouse night in Brunnen. Kos barking, people shouting, Boni coughing, beds and doors creaking, etc. I have to get up often to attend to Boni, and then I think of what Socrates said about pleasant and unpleasant things; my bed, otherwise unbearable, seemed very pleasant to me each time I leaped back into it after attending to the little ones, and so I laughed, recalling the two ends. R. got no sleep, either. We decide to return home at 10 o’clock.
At home, plebiscite—yes; letters, Clemens Brockhaus reports on the terrible state of his family following the calamity, then an obituary notice, Constantin Frantz has lost his son, R.’s last letter once again gave him a commission for the cemetery!! Arrival of Prof. Nietzsche’s speech in Latin, then of a lovely spring outfit which R. had ordered for me as a surprise! Letter from Frl. von Meysenbug (giving R. little pleasure). R. astonished to have received no reply from Eckert; so another enemy made! The latter will have taken advantage of the most convenient piece of gossip to divest himself of his gratitude.
When I come down to R. in the afternoon, he plays me a piece he has just thought out, “Blackbird Theme, Scherzo in the Beethoven Manner”—he copied it from our blackbird. “When I hear something like that, I call it quite simply a Beethoven allegro, meaning that he is the creator of this form, he is the master, without him it would not exist.” “How I should like now to write poetry!” he says. “What easy, swift work—what is it compared with writing scores? It is the skeleton, like bare branches, the tree in winter; music is the blossom, the leaves.”
Music in the evening. He plays me passages from the first act of Götterdämmerung. He then complains of the difficulty of the scene between Waltraute and Brünnhilde, the one in agitated haste, the other expansively moved that a friend has come to visit her.