Monday, January 30:
Yesterday I was not feeling well; today I am better. R. is pleased and says the quartet has cured me. "You are my imperial crown," he says jokingly.
We picture to ourselves the conversation between Bismarck and the puny Frenchman: "Where are you then, little people?" Bismarck will say, searching like Polyphemus for the tiny figures.
R. yesterday told the musicians that the difference between the last quartets and the earlier ones lies in their tremendous concision, and this is also where the difficulty of interpreting these works lies; since everything in them is solid core and they no longer contain any frills, each note must be played consciously, otherwise the result is unclear. That is why these things have the reputation of being incomprehensible, though, properly played, they are thoroughly melodious and indeed easy to grasp.
Gambetta is reported to have handed in his resignation; that would be a good thing. After lunch the musicians played us the Idyll in an arrangement by Richter; much emotion!
R. said how curious it seemed to him: all he had set out to do was to work the theme which had come to him in Starnberg, when we were living there together, and which he had promised me as a quartet, into a morning serenade, and then he had unconsciously woven our whole life into it, Fidi's birth, my recuperation, Fidi's bird, etc. As Schopenhauer said, this is the way a musician works; he expresses life in a language which reason does not understand.
"If I were a young fellow," R. said, "how I should like now to complete my Barbarossa, my Bernhard von Weimar! Frederick the Great still occupies my thoughts; his state of mind is in fact a true picture of our own up till now, the imagination French, but the essential being thoroughly German. This division ought to give the work an extremely interesting profile."
We still do not go out; fog and snow are too dense. Nice letter from an old friend, Alwine Frommann, who is also a friend of the Queen of Prussia; we are very pleased to receive a sign of life from this lady of 70.
Always great delight in Fidi: "If nothing comes of this one, then the devil take child making; one will have to try it like Wagner with the Homunculus."