Wednesday, December 14:
R. discusses with me the journey to Berlin next spring; I ask him whether I have to go, and he replies: “Definitely. Only with you am I something; together we form a whole; by myself I am no longer anything.” So be it, then! We decide to avoid hotel life and to stay with a family if possible.
R. works; the children and I devote our day to needlework. Shortly after lunch R. plays some passages from the scene of Brünnhilde’s awakening, which moves me unutterably—this genesis of love in a youth who does not even know what a woman is and who then enchants and rejuvenates this woman, who has already spun at the web of life and is his superior—this seems to me quite unique. And then the music! “Yes, I can still do it,” R. says, laughing. “It is not so long since I did that, and afterward I even managed the horrible story” (the first act of Götterdämmerung).
Very nice and intelligent letter from Clemens Brockhaus about Die Meistersinger in Leipzig and Beethoven. Doris is engaged again, which her mother is reluctant to announce. The cordial, familiar tone of R.’s nephew pleases me very much; I think of Fidi—that he might perhaps find a friendly relationship there. I am also touched by the decidedly friendly attitude toward me. “Oh, they know what is what,” R. says. “Anybody who gets to know you can be in no doubt at all about you. It was ordained in the stars that you should dedicate yourself to me.” Laughing, he adds, as he looks at my picture: “Oh, yes, the proud little lady was quite determined. I’ll show you, she is thinking.”
Ate late in the evening, since R. was working. Finished Calderon’s Los dos amantes del cielo; astounded by the coldness of the play and the flatness and shallowness of some of the scenes.