Thursday, September 14:
At four in the morning R. comes to inquire how I am, for I was indisposed yesterday evening and still am. Then he could no longer sleep, and went downstairs to write Herr Brandt a letter, asking him for a first estimate of the cost of putting in the foundations of the theater. He would then lay the foundation stone in the middle of October, if Baron Loen makes a favorable report, and would make a speech. “Then,” R. says, “the whole thing, as far as I am concerned, can hang fire for years. My speech, which will afterward be published as an appeal, ought to make some sort of impact.”
It fills me with sorrow to see R. so worried and agitated that he cannot possibly continue his creative work cheerfully and remain in good health. He said yesterday, “I am so churned up inside that even something like Tausig’s death goes in one ear and out the other, and that is not good.” I do not wish to look even a day into the future, so dizzy does it all make me feel.
R. told me he thought he had seen me come to him in the night and say to him in a very clear voice, “Tichtel.” But as even in his dream he remembered that I was hoarse, he believed it was a ghost, and cried out, waking himself up. Then he also dreamed that he had stolen something and had been put in prison; we laughed, and I remembered how he had once said, when we were talking about impossible things: “Murder, even in anger, would certainly be impossible for me, but stealing, from a rich banker when I was certain it would not be discovered, I believe I could do that. And yet, no, for I should constantly have to tell lies about where I got the money, and I couldn’t.”
Family lunch. I feel indisposed and cannot go out; R. goes into town. Before that he plays some of the second act, the reception of the Gibichungs: “a nice family,” says R., “who are greeted by their vassals with love and respect, a decorous, not a turbulent reception.” “But I can neither play it nor sing it; when I am done with this little opus I mean to content myself like Falstaff with only two shirts.”
He is worried because Fritzsch, his publisher, sends him no word. I have another worry, namely that Baron Loen will be restrained by his master, the Grand Duke of Weimar, from taking part in our venture; the Grand Duke has in fact flatly rejected Marie M.’s request to become a patron. But I do not tell R. this.
As we were driving home yesterday, R. sang to me Beethoven’s song “Heart, oh heart, what means this feeling?” and said, “Everything there lies in the first rhythmic movement; what keeps a theme from sounding trivial lies in the composer’s loyalty and faith, certainly not in the notes he chooses; a song can never be too simple.” “There is youthfulness in this song,” I said. “Yes,” says R., “and it is more Goethe than Beethoven.” Lothar Bucher sends R., who had asked him for it, the derivation of the word talent, from a Greek word meaning “weight.” R. is not well and is despondent; his income at the moment is small, and he told me that he did not know how to finance our journey if we have to make it next month.