Sunday, February 12:
The musicians cable that they are not coming, which disappoints the children greatly.
Yesterday afternoon sudden sounds of music startled us and enchanted the children; five German traveling musicians were standing out in the snow and had started to play without our having noticed their arrival. R. invited them into the hall, the whole household assembled on the stairs, and several things were played, to the great delight of the children. We gave the people beer and money and they departed in friendly spirits.
I said to R. that no audience in the Bayreuth theater could be more spellbound by the first notes of the Nibelungen than the children were when the first notes of these poor musicians rang out in the snowy silence of solitary Tribschen.
Marie Bassenheim comes on a visit, which for the children makes up to some extent for the lost quartet.
The Frenchman Michelet has written a splendid book, La France devant l'Europe; he judges things just like the Moblots and Turcos in the barracks here. In Austria they really have set up a Czech Catholic cabinet: this move seems to have been the Emperor's own brainchild; where will it lead? Our old friend Princess Hohenlohe was very active at its birth! One hopes it will all be to Germany's advantage.
We discuss our Berlin plans. A letter from my former servant, saying that since the war the need of the people has exceeded all bounds, leads R. to say that large cities should cease to exist, since they produce mobs, and mobs are un-German. It is very much to be regretted, he says, that the first Reichstag is being convened in Berlin; he wishes that smaller towns, Erfurt, Halberstadt, etc., could be given new life, instead of the large cities becoming ever larger and producing cancerous growths in the empire under the guise of prosperity.
R.'s astonishment that Kladderadatsch is edited by Jews, since the Jews have no wit of their own; though they are excellent subjects for witty observations, they themselves, he says, have no powers of observation. Heine is an exception, the daimon familiaris of the evil conditions in the Germany of his time.
In the evening Richter brings the conversation around to Gounod, and that sets us off on a dreadful musical tour: Faust, Le Prophete, Les Huguenots, Bellini, Donizetti, Rossini, Verdi, one after another. I feel physically sick; I pick up and seek refuge in a volume of Goethe, Paralipomena von Faust. But nothing helps, I suffer and suffer. It is too much for R. as well, and he begs Richter to stop after the latter sought to prove to him that Verdi was no worse than Donizetti.
At last, God knows how, we come to Bach's organ fugues! Richter had to play two of them, and then we found ourselves back on a plane where we could contemplate and wonder to the full. I told R. that, as far as my own feelings were concerned, the difference between Bach and Beethoven lay in the fact that the former called on all my powers; to follow him was a test of intelligence and character, whereas I could give myself over to Beethoven without any effort of will.
R. says: "Bach's music is certainly a conception of the world; his figurations, devoid of feeling, are like unfeeling Nature itself. Birth and death, winds, storms, sunshine, all these things take place just like such a figuration; the idea of the individual, in Bach always extraordinarily beautiful and full of feeling, is the same which asserts itself in all this to-ing and fro-ing, as steadfast as the Protestant faith itself. Mozart gives us a picture of this juxtaposition of the two things in Die Zauberflote, where the two guides sing to Tamino about eternal wandering and toiling; this is Bachian in feeling. And it belongs to the organ, which is as devoid of feeling as the universal soul, yet at the same time so powerful. In the themes dance motives alternate with hymns."
Thus R. continues for a long time to speak, and the Italian and Jewish ghosts are dispersed, but the feelings of nausea remain!