Took Lusch to a parson’s wife for sewing lessons; very nice impression, simplicity, poverty, but Goethe and Schiller and Humboldt on the bookshelves. —
My night was gloomy, I kept thinking of the term R. said to me to describe the expression which he declares is habitual to me—melancholy rapture, and I know that inside me ecstasy always turns into tears. —
The manuscript of the sketch of Tristan und Isolde, which R. had presented to Marie Muchanoff, arrives here from Warsaw in the afternoon. A sad acquisition! …
Children’s party. R. orchestrates.
He has to see a singer-composer who, though not much bigger than a dwarf, wants to sing Donner; R. observes that everyone seems to be a great composer nowadays, and whether it is something by Schumann, Cornelius, or X, he cannot tell the difference, it all seems the same to him. At lunch we had quarrelled about the Chopin piece which Josef Rubinstein played; R. becomes distracted by the figurations and arpeggios in piano music of a certain lyrical kind.
He plays something from Die Walküre and says he stands in a curious relationship with this work, all of which is for him still problematic, whereas in Munich it is already hackneyed. — In the evening a walk in the garden.