Worked with the children, began W. Scott’s “Quentin Durward” with Lusch. R. worked on his score despite a bad night, he is plagued by eczema on three fingers.
At noon Herr Hoffmann and wife, R. has at last persuaded him to make a new sketch! Afternoon party, which I attend solely in order to keep contacts open for the children; R., on the other hand, always against it, says he cannot understand life when I am not there, that house and children seem meaningless to him. —
Fine letter from the King, thanking R.; I remind R. of what an old fortuneteller in Munich once told him—that the King would always be sympathetic to him when the moon is waxing. — We have been having the most beautiful moonlit nights. In the evening our artist of the sgraffito-, the work on it makes me very nervous. —
Read a nice paper by a local district councilor, according to which the Fichtel Mountains were the cradle of ancient Teutonism, which pleases us. R., coming back to La niña de Gomez Arias, says it is too bad that these Moors, regarded as something to be stamped out like pests, once more provide the only decent characters: religion really existed only among the heathen, he says. —
R. tries in vain to make our Macedonian understand that the Greeks no longer exist, and that the Russians will one day unite all these Slavs. —
Regarding his score, R. tells me that during Siegfried’s narration in the forest, the “Forest Murmurs” from Siegfried would only be hinted at in the orchestra, for here it is Siegfried’s fate which must make an impact, and a natural phenomenon must not be allowed to obscure it; there was a difference, he said, between then, when he wanted the rustling of the forest itself to make an impression, and now; and anyway he could never just repeat anything, in such cases he could not even find the right notes for the transcription.