Friday, June 23:
Midsummer Day! But bad news to mark it: Richter writes from Vienna that the funeral music has been brought out by Meser in Dresden; an act of unmitigated baseness. R. was just about to sell it to Fritzsch; without a single word the Dresden publisher has cheated him out of it. I feel very miserable at having to report this to R.; in order to restore his spirits to some extent I say to him that I feel some good may come of it, for he will at last be able to get his hands on Meser. This does in fact cheer him up, but I do not really believe it, and expect only the worst.
R. sends telegrams about it to both Tichatschek and Meser. But he settles down to work after all, and as we go to lunch he says: “I am now sketching out a big aria for Hagen, but only for the orchestra. It is incredible what a bungler I am; I can’t transcribe at all. With me, composing is a curious affair; while thinking it up, I have it all in my mind, endless, but then comes the job of writing it down, and the mere physical actions get in the way. It becomes ‘How did it go?’ instead of ‘How is it?’; not ‘How is it to be?’ but ‘How was it?’ and then having to search about till one finds it again. Mendelssohn would raise his hands in horror if he ever saw me composing.”
We eat in the garden, for I want to enjoy Tribschen to the full as long as we still live here; this dream life, shall we ever be able to capture it again? While we are at lunch a bird is singing splendidly nearby. “How he talks,” says R., “how very deliberately he breaks off! I am absolutely certain that they tell one another things and understand one another.” When Jakob comes, we tell him to listen and tell us what sort of bird it is, but the bird, which had been singing the whole time, stops and sings no more: “The bad lad! Just try to pin Nature down!”
A nice day; we work in the afternoon. At seven o’clock we walk into town, where Rus causes us much bother.