"Yes. Did you not ask me for something heroic? Is Lady Macbeth not the woman who tries to be stronger than man and who breaks up from over-exertion? Can you imagine anything more prodigious?"
"What am I to do with her?" she asked again after a while. "I re-read Macbeth last night. She is terrible. Think only, she says that while her baby was smiling in her face she would have dashed its brains out, had she sworn to do it. I know that art can receive a new meaning from all successive generations, but how can a woman in this century of longing for peace speak words which were horrible even in those times of torture?"
I was surprised at her question which filled me with great happiness. She had read Macbeth this very night. Was this not a wonderful proof of her love? And she had not read it superficially. Oh, what a happy man I was to be able to call such a girl my own!
But how to answer her question was beyond me. All I could find to say was this:
"You forget, Mitzi, that I will make Lady Macbeth a beautiful, flexible cat in the first part, and a weak child in the second."
"My dear," she declared, "I fear that that is rather an empty sentence, and that you are not at all sure what you are going to make her."
I felt that her remark was just, and I resented her superiority a little. You see, I was a composer; and as a composer I believed that I need not think so very deeply, if only I felt profoundly. I suppose that most composers share this opinion, which may be erroneous.
Anyhow, I am sure that if I had been better at thinking (even at the cost of being less good at feeling) Mitzi would have preferred it. There were two Mitzis. The one was a very pretty, charming girl, yet probably somewhat insignificant. The other was an eminent artist, gifted in many respects. Instinctively it was the latter I loved. But to love a woman means to conquer her, not to be conquered. A superior woman wants to be vanquished by a more superior man. And I had capitulated already to the pretty girl. As for the artist, she simply annihilated me.
(The reader must not believe that these war-like expressions are the result of my entrenched authorship. If I were to use the language which I have learned here I would have first to publish a trench dictionary. No—these expressions are only the result of newspaper reading.)
Two days went by. Then Mr. Bischoff called upon me and, as he wanted a thousand crowns[1], he brought with him a detailed sketch of his libretto.