Friday, September 29:
“I have composed a Greek chorus,” R. exclaims to me in the morning, “but a chorus which will be sung, so to speak, by the orchestra; after Siegfried’s death, while the scene is being changed, the Siegmund theme will be played, as if the chorus were saying: ‘This was his father’; then the sword motive; and finally his own theme. Then the curtain goes up, Gutrune enters, thinking she has heard his horn. How could words ever make the impression that these solemn themes, in their new form, will evoke? Music always expresses the direct present.”
I inform him that I was occupied during the night with my reply to my father’s letter, and he says, “Accept it as a good sign and answer him in that spirit.” At breakfast we talk about a passage in Faust to which I had drawn R.’s particular attention and which gives us infinite delight: Mephisto’s “Let the ghost do what it likes.”
The popular element in Faust, Part Two: when one reads the play as a whole one does not pay sufficient attention to the detail, but as in music it makes an unconscious impression; yet it is rewarding afterward to contemplate and seek to fathom the individual parts. I write my reply to my father while R. is working. At lunch I show it to him, he feels it could be misinterpreted, and I tear the letter up.
Letter from Baron Loen, who is full of confidence about Bayreuth affairs, but nevertheless has not understood R. and says nothing about the laying of the foundation stone. Drive with the children in splendid weather. News from Hermine that she is not yet returning to relieve me, which vexes me a little, since I can scarcely cope with all the various demands now.