Saturday, December 31:
From Countess Krockow (reporting among other things that in Saxony there is great sympathy for the French). R. and I pay New Year calls to our clergyman Tschudi (whom R. greets not without emotion, since he was so friendly toward us). Then the Bassenheims, who are also in R.’s eyes hallowed and worthy of respect, since they were present at our wedding. The Countess tells us that Mont Avron has been taken.
In the carriage R. gives me a long look and says, after joking that I have too much breeding, that my affinity is reflected so comfortingly in my face; he looks back over the past and says: “My position in regard to you I can only describe in Tristan’s words in the second act—this attitude of hardly daring to believe which makes him a complete traitor toward Isolde; because poetry is always a step ahead, and only retrospectively can the reality prove how correctly the poet has seen things. How long did I suffer on Hans’s account before I recognized that here, as in Tristan, a power reigned against which everyone was helpless.*”
The reading of Tristan made me melancholy inasmuch as it reminded me of Richard’s situation at that time in Zurich, and I cannot think of such false images, disappointments, and fleeting emanations of madness without tears; R. reproves me for these feelings and says I imagine things as far more significant than they had in fact been, though certainly in becoming aware of them I had matured.
In the afternoon the quartet players from Zurich; R. rehearsed them in the F Major Quartet, Opus 59 (a favorite work of mine, if one may speak thus of such divine things), then the last (also F Major). Toward eleven o’clock the musicians go away; we stay up: Prof. Nietzsche, our good Richter, and we two. Midnight arrives; we wish each other a Happy New Year. May God bring us all peace!