Friday, March 12:
In the night I woke with a start. No bad dream had troubled me, but I was so melancholy that it was a long time before I fell asleep again. I forced myself not to reflect, to think of nothing, however many troubles should come to roost in my heart; when it is too full, it will simply burst. And it is incredible how much the heart can hold. At times I can feel mine literally expanding to take in more.
Early in the morning R. came up and played “Ein Engel stieg aus Himmelshöh’n” [“An angel descended from heavenly heights”]; he said he had seen me come into his room with the children, and this had come into his mind.
My life as a recluse is now almost ended, since recently, as we drove out, we met Colonel Am Rhyn, and when R. saw him again yesterday he had to tell him that I was here; I was expecting the children for Easter and had come early because I should not have been able to travel easily later. However, this will not make much difference to my seclusion, for I am shy of seeing other people.
R. worked long today and is terribly pent up on account of it. I avoid talking about it to him and divert the conversation to music in general. He says that up to Mozart music remained in a vegetable state, but with M. and particularly with Beethoven “anima” had entered into it. The Bachian fugue was like a great tree, so lofty and also imposing, yet in a completely different way from the human heart.
The weather is bad and one cannot go out, a fact of which I am indeed glad. Winckelmann and the children fill in my time. R. is going through what he composed in the morning and is not satisfied with it; he thinks he has gone too far in the proliferation of his motives.
At tea he said that, if he wanted to make things easy for himself, he would, from the moment Wotan says, “Seit mein Wunsch es will,” introduce recitative, which would certainly create a great effect, but would put an end to the work as art. Nobody has yet noticed with how much art he has employed all means to prevent the interruption of the flow of melody, while still achieving a romantic effect.
Music, he says, transfigures everything; it never permits the hideousness of the bare word, however terrible the subject. Afterward he read me various songs from the Edda: “Sinfiotli,” “Harbard and Thor,” “Wafthrudnir,” etc. I take delight above all in the sight of his face as he sits there opposite me, when his eyes grow dark and gleam and his resonant voice shatters my heart.