Fine weather, a walk with R. in the palace gardens, after breakfast everybody to work—I with Lusch, R. to his score, friend Klindworth to his arrangement.
After lunch talked a lot about Greek history, the vices and abominations of Sparta, the ignorance of the philosophers who took Sparta as an ideal, but the sublime fascination which this history exerts. Then the talk turned to Swiss history, the Battle of Saint Jakob, etc., splendid and moving, but without the nimbus of eternal art.
In the afternoon we play Brahms’s Triumphlied, much dismay over the meager character of this composition which even friend Nietzsche has praised to us: Handel, Mendelssohn, and Schumann wrapped in leather. R. very angry, he talks about his longing one day to find in music something that expresses Christ’s transcendence, something in which creative impulse, an emotion which speaks to the emotions, can be seen. In the evening went through many separate pieces by Auber and, to end with, the “Kaisermarsch”.