Monday, June 27:
Yesterday we spoke not a single word about the performance, and that was what R. needed, for he can stand no more about it; Richter found that out when he told him he had regretted the correction. “Have you no sense of honor left?” R. exclaimed violently. “They can clap, applaud, but nothing else; it was possible, in short, for such names as Hanslick and Schelle to appear on that invitation.”
The revival of Tannhäuser in Vienna seems to have achieved an unparalleled success. I write to the publisher Lucca in R.’s name. The day goes by, with no news from Munich, thank goodness—just in the evening there arrives a telegram whose signature put us in a good humor from the very start; a Herr Napoleon Homolatsch—probably a Bohemian—telegraphs of boundless rejoicing at the end of the first act. Yesterday there was the usual malevolent notice in the A.A.Z. about the dress rehearsal; I cut it out and hid it from R. In the evening continued W. Meister. R. derives from this characteristic work new proofs of the limited nature of poetry and the unlimited scope of music, which is not tied to any form of beauty, but quite naively produces the sublime.
At lunch he tells us about Hanslick (his mother a Jewess) and Herr Ambros, who allowed himself to be bought by the Neue Freie Presse (against R.), how both of them had approached him, made admissions to him, and then, reckoning on his good manners like the miserable creatures they are, had no fear that he would one day tell what he knew.