Saturday, December 23:
[Enclosed in the Diaries a note in Wagner’s handwriting: “Dec. 23, final rehearsal.”] Up, since R. had a very bad night. We talk about yesterday’s rehearsal. [Four lines omitted, most of the passage having been obliterated in ink by an unknown hand and several Keppler in praise of Luther!] He tells me of Eva’s grateful look as he accompanied her into the room and then looked after her.
R. takes a bath, feels well after it, is cheerful at lunch; makes jokes about old-fashioned juvenile works, for which the only substitute is newfangled Jewish works, then about “numskull” painters! My father shames us by mentioning my article - we had assumed he would not even notice it. R. goes out with the children in the afternoon, then returns and comes to my room in very good spirits. My father dines out.
The evening passes in conversation; R. says of the interval in the theme of the Leonore Overture that it marked the beginning of a new world, something passionately sublime.
[Added on the following page, but referred back to this point: “My father observes that the third in the Adagio reminds him of the third in the Andante of Beeth.’s Op. 106. R. says he always found this third ghostly; in his childhood he used to shout to his sister: ‘Cilie! There’s a big mask-thing in your bed!’ - Cilie intoned to the third. - In the evening he sings Belmonte’s aria from Die Entführung and the splendid Moorish serenade.”]
When we are talking about Schumann and I point out some significant things in him, R. says, “I cannot be fair - to be that one must be nothing oneself, must have nothing in one’s head except weighing pros and cons.” He then plays to us the “Bridal Song” from Lohengrin and the Tristan Prelude. He feels that no attention has yet been paid to the thematic working of the latter - for example, when at the end of the first act Isolde breaks into declarations of love.
When I sing a theme to R. with our last good-night kiss, he says these are the anxious looks which are both inquiring and eloquent. “Why is it that love reveals itself in this highest form only through suffering?” I observe that the happy love of a youthful couple also has an air of melancholy about it. He says: “Yes, that is the yearning to lose one’s being and to live only in the other.”