Friday, December 20:
R. had a good night, but he complains of tightness on the left side. The doctor denies any suggestion of a lung or heart ailment. Yesterday R. received a calendar from our printer Bonfantini; he looks up his birthday and sees that it falls on Ascension Day: "So I shall probably also ascend to Heaven then." When, toward evening, he says something similar in front of Wolz. and I tell him he is wrong to do so, he jokes: "It's to keep you all respectful" - no, he said that on some previous occasion - "It's to keep your sympathies aroused!"
Sounds of music in Wahnfried again, and when R. parts from me around noon, he says: "I have been playing the last pages of Parsifal. I've never heard any music like it. But I need an awful lot of time!" He adds, "It moved me very much." At lunch we discuss the affair of the Wurzburg student. R. says the sergeant need only have read Busch's book, where there is talk of nothing else but shooting people down. He says it is a matter of behaving as if we were in a state of war, but everything is like that nowadays in our country; he does not defend the student's conduct, and undoubtedly discipline is now very good in the army, but this was treating a person as if he were cattle.
Talking of Parsifal, R. says, "The longer one lives, the longer one has to live - I need a great deal of time." At supper we talk about old times, the sojourn in Biebrich, the pipe that smoked, the servant girl Lieschen, for whom he spoke up when she was falsely accused of something or other, and who, though completely exonerated, still kept on weeping: "Just think, if I hadn't found such a good master, and how many don't find them -" she said. Then his landlord Frickhafner, "the hypochondriac," who was always quarreling with his old housekeeper and one day shouted to her over the banisters, "You're as stupid as an owl!" whereupon R., who happened to be there, called up, "You mean as rude as an owl!"
An unpleasant incident with Herr Kellermann, who goes off to practice for the amateur concert instead of staying for the talk on Bach's fugues. R., very annoyed, tells him his piano playing there is not worth a jot, whereas here he might learn something. Herr K. goes, but R. is very agitated; as he says, he can never tell a person the truth calmly and unconcernedly, and that is why he prefers to avoid such encounters. Now he is sorry about it, or, rather, he is upset, and much time passes before we can settle down to Bach's 48 Preludes and Fugues. R. describes the 17th fugue as a dance, and traces a few steps to the first bars, then says it is freer in form, already approaching the sonata. Prelude 18 enchants and moves one, and its fugue R. calls a fairy tale told by the grandmother in the Edda. The theme is expressive of complete resignation, and he sings some words to it, which end, "And so it then must be." In the 19th prelude he laughs over the fifths and says, "Bach wrote those deliberately, saying, 'People know what a musician I am, and they know that when I write something like this, I do it on purpose, for the sake of the idea.'" Concerning the 20th fugue, he says Bach must first have thought of it in four voices, then arranged it for the piano. It is such things, he says, that brought Bach into disrepute and caused his teacher Weinlig to refuse to have anything to do with him. Referring to one of the fugues between nos. 16 and 20, R. says it is curious how Bach sometimes reeled off the most significant themes as if on a spinning wheel, "he does not make anything of them." Then, to our great enjoyment, Mozart's C Major Symphony (not the Jupiter), which R. recalls having heard played as entr'acte music amid the bangings of students who wanted the play to begin.