Friday, January 29:
In the night, read Devrient’s book to the end. In the morning, good, friendly letters from Mathilde [Maier]. Richard well, the children lively—I think of you, my absent ones, may you not miss your mother as much as she misses you!
At lunch R. reminds me that yesterday during our conversation about the Battle of Marathon and the sudden noble assistance of the Plataeans tears came into our eyes, while during the reading of “The Fight with the Dragon” we actually wept. He thought we should not tell others what we were weeping about!
Then he told me he had the feeling that he really had always been surrounded by rogues. From this book he saw with utter disgust how Eduard Devrient, when he got to know of R.’s activities in Dresden and saw all that was being done, arranged for Mendelssohn to be offered a position there. Not a word of that had he heard at the time. Mendelssohn was of course wise enough not to respond to the proposals.
Amusing, too, to see the scene in which Sachs tries the shoe on Eva described in the press as “embarrassing”! R. says I should keep a list of all the nice things said about him; in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung, for instance, all that was said about the Meistersinger in Dresden was that servants stood in the cold outside the box office to secure tickets. A report on its success obviously omitted. And after the second performance it is “added” that Rietz, the conductor, was called to take a bow, and that in Dresden they had needed fewer rehearsals than in Munich. The work itself is passed by, simply the opportunity seized with delight to stir up vexation in Munich!
R. is very much occupied with his Siegfried and absorbed by it. The children are good—if I only knew how the little ones there are getting on! No report would be enough, but I have again had no letter for a long time.
No dictation in the evening, but compiling an anthology of the “correct, counter-jumping German” of E. Devrient. Strong gale blowing.