Wednesday, December 20:
We get up late, and at breakfast I pluck up courage to speak to R. about Hans’s condition. R. observes that it was after all to be expected. But not by me - not that! And, even if feared, the advent of what one fears still splits open a precipice which nothing can hide! R. is much more resigned than I am. However, I take the resolve, whatever my inner feelings, to regain my self-control. I embrace R. with all my heart and tell myself that God will have mercy. He will! I ask Jouk., who was present when the news arrived, to write to Frau Ritter. Lusch asks me whether she should not send her father something for Christmas.
At lunch there is talk about legitimacy, the present legitimate princes, and R. is very bitter. Before lunch R. went out with Lusch and Jouk., walked as far as the corner from which one can see the sea and S. Michele. After coffee and his afternoon rest R. brings me the news, which is better! He had already told me in the morning that the dreadful name of the illness had not been mentioned in the report, he had just deduced it from the description. And I feel as if I have been restored to life as I set out with R. on this afternoon walk. The light outside is glorious, and the sunshine in my heart matches it. R. gazes at the sea and describes the ebb and flow as its breathing in and out.
Then he goes off to rehearsal; on his return I go to see him, and he tells me - after saying that I should ask the children to tell me about it - that the rehearsal began very stormily because two players were absent and the others tried to make excuses for them! R. made a speech in French which had a great effect; after that, apparently, they played excellently, and altogether the players seem to be full of enthusiasm for R., they repeat his jokes to one another and understand him quite well. R. feels very happy in his métier, and it is only the things coming from outside that he finds disagreeable - such as Herr Filippi from Milan, for example. This journalist was made to pay for it, and R. says he finds this type of person particularly repugnant, for they always feel they must write wittily, “and it looks very odd when witty things are written about people like us!” Of the fugue, he says that fugal themes like this are not worth a jot, since one chooses them always with an eye toward the execution. Of the symphony as a whole he says one discerns in it the pupil of Mozart and Beethoven, one can see their influence everywhere, though nothing is directly copied.
At supper R. praises my father’s letters, saying that everything he writes is beautifully expressed. “I can’t do that,” he adds. “For that you need noblesse, good breeding, which I don’t have.” He jokingly demonstrates to us how dogs howl, the telegram in which Herr Neumann declines on behalf of himself and Seidl (R. had sent them an invitation). In the evening we talk about folk singing; R. plays the melancholy fandango to which he had once seen a tightrope walker dance, accompanied by a forlorn violin. Later he reads to us from King Lear: the scene with Kent in disguise and the Fool, then the one with Goneril, and the amazing scene in which the Fool is waiting for the horses. R. points out that Lear’s first experience with Goneril arouses only anger, indignation in him; with Regan, however, he becomes humble, talks about his fear of going mad. R. reports in the evening that Hans has indeed been put in an institution, but there are hopes of an improvement. R. adds that Hans will outlive us all! I feel that God has had mercy on me. (At the start of the terrible night of Monday R. cried out from his bed, “I hate all pianists - they are my Antichrist!”)