Wednesday, January 20:
Off to sleep late, but slept well; sad thoughts, however, in the morning. R. once again mentions the letter to Countess Bismarck, I again try to dissuade him, and he gives in. But I do not know if I have done right. He is unutterably good to me.
Yesterday evening we had to laugh heartily; he demanded something, I was at first against it, then I came round to it and explained to him how it was that I now wanted to follow his bidding, whereas I had not before; during this explanation he heard me use the words, “But, my dear Wagner.” He mentioned it at first jokingly, and I did not properly understand him, so let it go, but he became increasingly vehement and said it had never happened before that I called him “my dear Wagner.” At last I understood him, and when I explained that it would never have occurred to me to call him that and he must have heard me wrong, we laughed heartily and long.
I have not gone to the children, because I want to write to Loulou and Hermine. That takes me the whole morning. In the meantime Richard comes up and shows me page 200, which he is now writing out. Feeling very unwell, weeping out of weakness, I have to pull myself together by force even just to bring myself to the table.
We discuss Preller’s illustrations to the Odyssey; Richard laughs and says that with my feelings for art I should have married a very rich man. After lunch a letter arrives from Esser, the musical director in Vienna, saying that the management there intends to stage Die Meistersinger in October of next year, that is to say, in two years’ time! Yet Dingelstedt had been in a great hurry with his contract, in which R. was to undertake not to let any fragments from his work be played in Vienna and also to give no other theater besides the Court theater the right to produce the opera. So the intention was to suppress Die Meistersinger entirely. Luckily R. was suspicious and did not accept the clause.
We are quite appalled at this new example of unworthiness. Here probably everything is working hand in hand: bureaucracy, Judaism, theater management, Dingelstedt, and perhaps even the Court. Through such experiences I realize very clearly how isolated he is and how he has utterly no one at his side but me.
He goes into town, I take up the Schiller correspondence, read, and brood. Our recuperation and distraction are always the children, who are well and cheerful. Before tea I finish the correspondence.
R. comes up, very despondent; he had now reached the stage where he could only keep silent. “Then let us be silent,” I told him, smiling. But with me, he said, it was always all right, he wanted to talk with me, but with nobody else; silence was the only thing that remained for him after all his experiences. He is not well.
We started to talk again about the theater, and he observed that, if one wanted to present Goethe’s Faust, it should be done without intermissions, played through without a break, as he had once seen done in London with a pantomime, which lasted three hours without an intermission and proved very gripping.
Henry VI, Part I completed, having given us much enjoyment. I had read it years ago, but was quite incapable then of appreciating the remarkable nature of its fleeting portrayal or noting the wonderful characterization beneath the loose jumble. It had passed me by like a mirage, but now I saw every figure and felt every situation.
At parting Richard said that Schopenhauer was quite right: the sum total of wisdom would be to believe nothing and to say nothing. If he had not believed the King, for example, how much trouble would he have saved himself! We come back to the Viennese newspaper, and I advise Richard to use the announcement as a means of showing his acquaintances in Vienna and Berlin why his works are not being performed.
Animatedly we discuss the situation; at times I, too, realize disconsolately how black things look. But he surely cannot have lived completely in vain; however hard they try, these people will not in the end be able to destroy him entirely.
I am so upset that I cannot get to sleep, and take up Schiller’s poems, “The Fight with the Dragon”; it would really be enough for a lifetime to immerse oneself in such a poet, to understand and appreciate him thoroughly. How can people even begin to do so when they read all sorts of things at once, including mediocre stuff?
Good night, my children, I feel you close to me; you are both my sorrow and my hope.