Wednesday, January 15:
R. had a good night, but he complains of congestion in the chest and wishes me already to book the villa in Naples for next year. Yesterday afternoon he came to tell me that the royalties from Vienna have been good - all his works, even Kienzl, had earned something. I: “So they are good children, after all.” R.: “Yes, they have to go begging for me.”
He fetches me for lunch and says, “I have got Parsifal to the point of fainting - I’m always glad when I’ve got my people where they ought to be.” Over coffee he says he can only bear his state of well-being when composing - otherwise it seems to him like a sin. He looks into the salon and says, “This is where I want to be carried when I die.” I reproach him for using the singular. He: “It’s better when one knows nothing about it, but all the same, when one is very old it must be nice to die in full awareness.” I tell him my only wish is that we do not leave the children while they are still dependent on us. He: “What do you expect? In 10 years I shall be Kraussold’s age, and Fidi will be 20; by then one knows who one is. We shall live to see Fidi’s children.”
R. does some more work in the afternoon, and in the evening we go through Berlioz’s overtures to King Lear and Benvenuto Cellini with Herr Rubinstein. “Oh, Cherubini, Cherubini!” R. exclaims. Long discussion then about Berlioz, which he concludes with me upstairs by saying it would be better if such music had never been written. Barrenness, touches of vulgarity amid great eccentricity, overattention to detail, yet some true inspiration: “There are themes of his I remember,” R. says. “One theme in the Adagio of Roméo et Juliette is wonderful.” “But he belongs entirely to the French school.” Taken on the whole, a very unpleasing impression.