Tuesday, October 3:
Very unsettled night; Fidi did not sleep a wink and never stopped talking. Yesterday R. told me some very touching things about the women of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, among others Gessner’s wife; they produced great men through their loyalty and enlightened outlook.
The Gessner couple very moving. I ask whether this is the Gessner who wrote idylls, and this leads us on to Bodmer, the dedication of the Nibelungenlied to Frederick the Great, and his judgment on it. R. links to this the remark that great statesmen are not governed by historic thoughts, but do at the proper time what the exigencies of the moment demand; in political life the historical viewpoint fulfills roughly the same function as museums in art. “Oh, after all, if music is not meant to give new life to the whole world, it is not worth very much.”
R. works and then plays me the splendidly daemonic “Helle Wehr” of poor Bruennhilde. Often, he says, he shudders to think that he might suddenly grow tired of writing this work, “but,” he consoles me, “now that I have got so far, I shall finish it.”
Wrote to Rothschild, who has again not sent me my money. I am indisposed, very tired. R. brings a letter from Luise von Buelow, Hans’s stepmother, to Daniella; she wants to see the two eldest children. Difficult as I find it, I decide at once to send the children to Weggis tomorrow. R. scolds me, says she can visit the children here, but I do not like isolating the children from their family, and in God’s name!