Long sleep, followed immediately by getting dressed for the second concert at 12 o’clock. Very pleasant, intimate atmosphere, better performance, familiar audience, Materna and Niemann in tears, R. cheered up afterward. Dinner at Poppenbergers’, with the Niemanns, Maternas, and Eckerts. In the evening at Helmholtzs’; made the acquaintance of Mommsen,[1] who, as R. says, “looks like he put on the professor’s mask for a fancy dress ball”. With H. von Radowitz,[2] a plan was devised to pressure the state to intervene in the Bayreuth matters!
[1] The historian Theodor Mommsen (1817-1903), who was the Secretary of the Prussian Academy of Sciences in Berlin.
[2] Joseph Maria von Radowitz (1839-1912), diplomat and official in the Foreign Office in Berlin.
Revised English translation by Jo Cousins.