Saturday, January 17:
R. slept well, and when worry woke me up during the night, it was like balm to gaze upon his tranquil features. What we had been reading in Schop. about the physiognomy came into my mind; he had never looked as fine as he did then.
He read this chapter to us, and at first he was struck by the repetition of something already said; but afterward he says how right that was, for Schop. wanted to deduce something from it, and if he had simply written “the fore-mentioned,” it would have conveyed nothing. He also reads us some of Sch.’s poems, to our delight; they remind one somewhat of Goethe’s epigrams, which R. says he would like to have in a special edition. This morning he answers the enclosed postcard from W., concerning editorial difficulties, Dr. Bernhard Förster’s views on the Gospels. Less and less can R. tolerate mocking references to Christianity. Yesterday he exclaimed, in connection with the idea of people’s being made happy through education, “How can one speak of such things, with beggars stretching out their crippled hands?”
He quotes to us several things from Düntzer about the education of Goethe’s son August; the sentence beginning with “Only,” following from what has gone before, is incomprehensible and unsuitable for reading aloud; even in this good and simple book R. finds traces of those affectations which nowadays disfigure the German literary style. In the afternoon he takes the streetcar into the city for the first time and returns very content, except that an encounter with a German headmaster somewhat spoiled his mood; he remarks how improper it is for a person he does not know to address him just because he recognizes him; it would be much more proper for people who do not recognize him to speak to him simply as a fellow countryman.
In the evening to see La Juive, pleasure in the San Carlo, a genuine opera house, pleasure in the many beauties of the work, pleasure in the orchestra, outstanding, and in the two English-horn players, but dismay over the singing and acting and the production; continual discrepancies between music and theatrical presentation, continual shouts from the prompter’s box. Grand opera, it seems, is now dead, surviving only as an object of study by specialists. R. remarks how this work, originating in the school of Méhul and Cherubini, is full of life and refinement and is not at all Jewish, even in its treatment of its subject; it is just correctly observed. He says of the circuslike duet between the Cardinal and the Jew, “This had to be a bold sort of march theme; since the time of La Muette something of that sort had been obligatory in the third act.” He says that La Juive belongs to the same period as Notre Dame de Paris, when so many significant things were produced. When I say that this work seems the most significant of them all, he replies, “Yes, that is because of the power of music.” Halévy, he says, was the first musical genre-painter, and he had more feeling than Cherubini: “I liked him very much; he was a yearning, sensual character, but lazy.”
When I tell him, in the morning, that I cannot get Brangäne’s theme in the first act out of my mind, ‘Vo lehte der Mann’, and sing it to him, he says, “This work has now been published, yet nobody really, no musician, has recognized what kind of music it is.” I observe that musicians are too limited in outlook for that, but in their place Tristan has won many fanatic admirers.