Monday, December 4:
At breakfast we talk about yesterday’s rehearsal of [Goethe’s] Die Geschwister, and I tell him my father’s remark to the effect that he has no feeling for drama, and even in Shakespeare is interested only in the ideas. R. thinks, as do I, that this is the result of a French upbringing. R. goes on to say that he had been thinking previously about the F Major Symphony; one cannot really say that such a work touches one’s heart, so what is it that gives one such satisfaction? It is this joyfulness, like Brahma making sport with himself. This, he says, is a very German quality. Making joyful sport with oneself in this way does not lead to laughter, for there is nothing in the least ironic about it (like the humor of Cervantes, for example) — it is entirely positive. And it is this same spirit which prevails in Faust.
R. then says he intends to make another attempt to read Ariosto, since such eminent minds as Schop., Goethe, Gob. held him in such high esteem. Lusch joins us, is praised for her acting yesterday, R. jokingly offers himself for the part of Fabrice, whom he calls a second Brackenburg: “After Klärchen’s death he tried again.” The conversation at lunch is very cheerful; R. is continuing to read the Russian novel with great interest and relates several things from it, how, for example, in his naïveté Napoleon wished to receive the Boyars in Moscow!
R. stays at home today. In the evening my father plays to us three preludes from the 48 Preludes and Fugues, among them the “Magister” — or “Magister as Jupiter tonans,” as R. remarks. Then the first movement of Weber’s A major Sonata; R. says one can certainly appreciate its charm, but it is music for an audience, not the kind one makes for oneself like the Beethoven sonatas, and remembering Preciosa and Euryanthe always make one see that Weber’s true sphere was the theater. One is also conscious of a certain superficiality, he says; it follows, not on Beethoven, but on Hummel and Kalkbrenner. We then play whist, in which R. has to endure much vexation over his strikingly bad cards!