Thursday, September 14:
R. had a restless night. And he now gets down to clearing things up, a task we began a few days ago. Several business matters have to be settled. Hardest of all R. finds the parting from the dogs, Marke in particular, whom he feels he will not see again! — Siegfried’s appearance is also worrying us, and me the unsettled nature of his young existence, also the sorrow he experienced in finding on his return that the large theater he had laboriously built for himself in the little garden had been destroyed on his father’s instructions. We depart at 7 in the evening. Seeing the bookbinder Senfft, our manager Moritz, and Schnappauf at the station, R. says, “For me they are Bayreuth.” The journey to Nuremberg takes a long time, R. dozes off and says to me, “You are talking of roses, I can smell them here.” In Nuremberg we say goodbye to our friend Joukowsky. R. sleeps but is restless, frequently talking aloud. When there is mention on the train of the Wagnerites’ preference for Tristan und Isolde even over Parsifal, R. says: “Oh, what do they know? One might say that Kundry already experienced Isolde’s Liebestod a hundred times in her various reincarnations.”