Tuesday, June 20:
In the morning R. embraces me and sings, “For my Redeemer liveth.” Then he tells me he has been thinking how pitiful he would look if after the death of his wife he had married some good rich woman like Frau Eckert; everything was possible, since men are such bunglers. How noble must he now appear, having me. I have constantly to listen to such things, and I have no answer to them.
R. is girding himself for composition; his first act both pleases and dismays him. “Shall I continue like this?” The scene between Waltraute and Brünnhilde he finds “utterly incomprehensible,” so completely did he forget it. He says: “I should be uneasy if I did not know that everything I do passes through a very narrow door; I write nothing which is not entirely clear to me. The most difficult thing in this respect was the last act of Tristan, and I made no mistakes there.”
In the Musikalische Zeitung a Wagner devotee writes very severely about Rienzi, which has just been produced in Vienna. R. says, “Rienzi is very repugnant to me, but they should at least recognize the fire in it; I was a music director and I wrote a grand opera; the fact that it was this same music director who later gave them such hard nuts to crack, that’s what should astonish them.”
Raining furiously all day long; in the evening a splendid rainbow. I tell R., “That is the sign from Heaven that you are beginning your work again.” In the evening R. asks whether he should include in the printed score of Siegfried the poem which he wrote last year when sending it to the King for his birthday. He then reads the poem, and finds it rather cold and insincere: “What enabled me to finish the work was something quite different.” This observation makes me feel melancholy in spite of myself, which worries R. very much; he says he cannot bear that anything he says gives me pain.
During the day I told him that I believed the German Empire would achieve wonders, for it was no accident that his Nibelungen coincided with Germany’s victories. Whether we shall live to see it I do not know, but Fidi. Wrote to K. Tausig.