Thursday, October 20:
R. dreamed of his late wife. [A sentence based on untranslatable word play omitted.] We are not pleased that Paris has not yet been bombarded, for the longer the delay the more our poor troops must suffer. Garibaldi, the old fool, is organizing in the Vosges district!
Very bad weather; family lunch, then games with the children and Sicilian fairy tales. In the evening R. reads us Hoffmann’s Marino Falieri, the structure of which strikes us as very good, but the style, particularly in the love scenes, is very unattractive.
R. orchestrates the scene between Wotan and Siegfried and says its words are the finest he has ever written, then adds jokingly, “Wotan is tragic because his life is too long, Siegfried because his is too short.” (Letter to me from Tausig, to R. from H. Herrig. Herr Stade sends his refutation of Hanslick’s conception of beauty in music.)