Friday, September 29:
R. slept well, and we have breakfast in cheerful spirits; I admonish him to place his eggcup farther in on the table, since frequently he has a very vexing mishap with it, but he does not do so, and when I say that this obstinacy, which is a weakness in others, is a divine power as far as he is concerned, he laughs loudly and seizes every occasion to say, “My divine power!” It also always raises his spirits to gaze at the little garden and see beyond it the gondolas flitting past “like silent ghosts.” He thinks of Goethe and Schiller, who persisted in staying in Weimar and Jena; he finds that incredible, though certainly these places were better than Dresden, Vienna, or Berlin, for instance. When I observe that we would certainly have stayed in Bayreuth if it had not been for the climate, he says, “All the same, I prefer the sight of the town here to the road to the Eremitage!” At lunch, after we have talked about our morning walks, he tells us that he started his in the neighborhood of the M. de l’Orto and had two encounters with the common people, first of all with a man who, talking to someone behind him, did not notice him and collided with him, and was profuse in his apologies; but then a rogue who begged from him and could not tear his eyes away from the pendants on his watch chain. Over coffee, since Dan. replies to him in a very dignified way, he discusses my rebuke yesterday and says that I was wrong, that I had misunderstood the children’s curiosity. As I am explaining myself, he gets up and leaves the room, but he soon returns and is quite gay and unconcerned. He says of the Italians that they deserve to be beaten, since they did away with the drum and introduced the “contemptible” high trumpet in its stead. He compared the flutes in present-day orchestras with steamship whistles. Yesterday evening he began to sing the Leonore Overture and said nobody before Beethoven had any notion of a theme like that. R. goes out with the children while I copy his letter to Herr Neumann. They tell me at supper about their visit to Bauer’s, where they enjoyed beer and chocolate, then about the rude waiters, all very lighthearted. In the evening Herr Wolkoff visits us and entertains R. with his lively conversation about the present problems of science, among them experiments with hypnosis. Then he amuses us with stories about the present-day painters called Impressionists, who paint “nocturne symphonies” in ten minutes! (At table recently R. said that for him portraiture was the main feature of painting, its true discovery. He said large historical compositions meant little to him. But tonight, expressing his preference for clean, not daubed, painting, he adds jokingly, “I am for Titian’s Tribute Money.”) At lunch there was talk of the natural age of a human being (200 years), and I recalled that R. recently said he would live to be 94, and we would have to put up with him for another 24 years! At supper he thought of Marke on our last day, how he seemed to know that R. was going away.
[Enclosed in the Diaries is a visiting card bearing the name Joseph Schroeder and inscribed by Wagner: “Founder of idealism.”]