Wednesday, September 6:
I write to Marie M. R., who reads my letter, says it suits its address just as little as his Tristan the Emperor of Brazil. R. works. Very close weather; we decide on a drive.
In the morning R. told me he intended to write a short article on Weber, taking off from a very conceited statement the latter once made about Beethoven’s lack of formal clarity, which he, Weber, took care not to imitate. R. wants to show that it was precisely in his misunderstanding of Beethoven that Weber’s whole weakness lay, confining him within the boundaries of conventional form and stereotypes.
When I tell Wagner that I like the final ensemble number in Rossini’s Tell, R. says: “Yes, it is incredibly lacking in ideas, but firstly it is dynamic in effect, and then the simplicity of this succession of chords, after all the operatic larks, does one good; it gives the effect of Nature.” I feel that in the opera the emptiness is concealed by the sunrise and the Swiss costumes, whereas in the symphony into which my father has transferred these effects the emptiness is very noticeable. R. says, “Beethoven makes his effect mostly in similar ways, through continuity, but with him things are of course always quite different.”
We start on our drive toward evening, and R. remarks, “These contours of low, wooded hills used to arouse feelings of longing and melancholy in me; I wanted to get beyond them, away, to the other side.” I: “Yes, to the place where you are not; I know the feeling.” “But now,” R. says, “I wish to stay at home, I find going away utterly loathsome; I am glad of children around the house, the teeming life surrounding me, only I should like to be fifteen years younger.”
While getting ready to go out, he looked at the picture of his uncle Adolph and exclaimed: “How happy my uncle now is, how he will continue to live, in a way he certainly never expected! But without me, or rather, without you, he would now be completely forgotten; nobody in my family would have given him a thought.” On the journey he told me that at the age of ten to twelve he had often visited an exalted lady, Frau Schneider; for lack of space, the books in her house were all kept in one little room, “and you should have seen me among those books in that little room!”
We talk of the love between Siegfried and Bruennhilde, which achieves no universal deed of redemption, produces no Fidi; Goetterdaemmerung is the most tragic work of all, but before that one sees the great happiness arising from the union of two complete beings. Siegfried does not know what he is guilty of; as a man, committed entirely to deeds, he knows nothing, he must fall in order that Bruennhilde may rise to the heights of perception.
We then discuss why German opera composers know nothing of the fire of love; with them love is just a sort of sentimental convention, its highest expression Ottavio in Don Giovanni. The French have more passion, but it is also very rare there. Letters from Karl von Gersdorff and M. von Schleinitz. In the evening cold punch, Carlyle, and lovely moonlight shining straight through our French windows.