Wednesday, March 27:
R. had a good night; he tells me at breakfast that he has half a mind to send for the Munich machinist, in order to ensure that the dragon and the fight are done properly in Munich, but then he would want the newspapers to report that he had arranged it. The dragon should come from below, he says; only its head should be seen, and then its tail when Siegfried, springing down, fights with it.
We remember with pleasure all the things we have carried out and arranged, the production of the Ring just one episode among the rest. Before that R. said to me, “We are now enjoying the fruits, not of resignation, but of desire, all the striving of our natures.” He feels the wish to buy more land for the garden; then he would no longer need to go outside his own home.
At lunch R. comes to fetch me with the words “Nenn’ ich Euch schön, dünkt Euch das recht” [“If I call you beautiful, does that seem right to you?”] he has just reached this point. At lunch he talks about the Greek lyric poets, whom he is now reading; the preface by [left blank] interests him, particularly in connection with the oracles and the significance the poets attached to rhyme, also the fact that people wrote in verse at all. “That was new to me,” he says. In the afternoon he writes to Herr v. Perfall about the dragon.
Reading the Schopenhauer biography, in the middle of it he exclaims, “A mistake, it will be A-flat major!” A break in our reading, he goes into the garden, comes back, and says he has seen the carriage with its shafts turned completely toward the east. “What does the donkey mean by this pointing toward the east? ... Maybe that after Parsifal I am to compose Die Sieger.” Schopenhauer’s letter to the Danish Academy reminds him of his letter to Bismarck (1873), and he asks me if I have it; I fetch it, we read it and are astonished that it was never answered. I found it an oppressive day; in reply to my inquiry about the condition of our friend Pusinelli I learned from his daughter that his life is despaired of! I do not tell R. this. In the evening R. thinks of friend Sulzer and resolves to send him a copy of Parsifal.