Sunday, May 29:
All kinds of fun and games with the children while R. works. We hear that Laube has had to leave the theater in Leipzig, since the town, deeming it necessary to close it down, would not give him any compensation: “How degrading for such an old hand, to be caught up so in the common grind.”
Walk through the woods with the older children; R. could not bring himself to leave the little ones at home, so we turned back, fetched them in the carriage, and then had them driven home, while we walked home through the woods. At lunch we spoke of the need to possess Shakespeare in English, Walter Scott, too; regarding the latter, it suddenly occurs to R. that he covered the whole of English history in his novels, except for the period Shakespeare dealt with.
A murder case which is filling the newspapers (the entire family of an inoffensive smith murdered by a thief) reminds us of the terrible fate which governs us all. It is not the murder itself which fills us with horror, but the fearful lot which can be meted out to any one of us. On our return home, Vreneli tells us she heard in the town that a boat had been sucked into the paddle of the steamer, and the man and child in it killed; our people in Tribschen heard the screams of the passengers on the steamer. With such warnings, such signs, who can call himself fortunate here below?
Conversation at supper brings us to Mozart. Dealing with Die Zauberflöte, R. says, “Mozart is the founder of German declamation—what fine humanity resounds in the Priest’s replies to Tamino! Think how stiff such high priests are in Gluck. When you consider this text, which was meant to be a farce, and the theater for which it was written, and compare what was written before Mozart’s time (even Cimarosa’s still-famous Matrimonio Segreto)—on the one side the wretched German Singspiel, on the other the ornate Italian opera—one is amazed by the soul he managed to breathe into such a text. And what a life he led! A bit of tinsel at the time of his popularity, but for that he had then to pay all the more dearly. He did not complete his work, which is why one cannot really compare him with Raphael, for there is still too much convention in him.”
We begin Die Jungfrau von Orleans; at the conclusion of the prologue R. says, “Yes, it all begs for music, though that is not to say it fails as a work of art.” When I tell him that just one thing offends me, the father, Arc, whom I should prefer to see handled in the Shakespearean manner, R. says, “Don’t even think of it: Sh[akespeare] is a natural genius, Schiller an artistic one; he and Goethe wanted to wring true pathos from the German language and rescue the German stage from vulgar realism.” As, in tears, we come to the end of the first act, R. says, “As Goethe touches us through his objectivity, Schiller touches us through his subjectivity.”