Saturday, November 5:
Gen. Moltke is said to be ill, the armistice is as good as certain, it all upsets us. R. works on his score without much heart: “All that has happened to me in the past two years is just too dismal—when I think of the people in Munich, putting Die Walküre in the program when they are otherwise in a fix! I suppose that is not too bad, but the King, the King—who can explain or understand such a character? Only a dramatist would be able to reproduce him, inexplicable as he is—that is why I say drama is the only really living art.”
With R. I take Loulou for her English lesson and hear her praises sung, and we recognize in her her father’s brilliant intellectual gifts. In the evening music: Richter plays us the B-flat Major Symphony; music always makes me contemplative, brings me to a recognition of life and of myself; it is like a penance, it shows me all the guilt of existence, but in a conciliatory light. In bed I thought of Hans and all the suffering I have caused him; weeping, praying, I fall asleep.
At lunch R. expressed the wish to form a string quartet (Richter as violist, the other three to come from Zurich); I have my doubts on the financial side, but keep silent about them.