Dear Kietz,
Many thanks for your last letter: I rejoiced in its contents no less than in the friendly spirit behind them. I enclosed the note to Seghers which you requested. Will you please be kind enough to take care of it?
I am answering so late because I have only just come around to the letters I owe. Until now I have been deeply absorbed in work from which I don't allow myself any digression. I have just written a Young Siegfried which I want to set to music for Weimar in response to an order: it is supposed to precede Siegfried's Death and is more light-hearted in character. I now make people talk and write a lot about me in Germany: Härtels are to edit the piano score of Lohengrin and even want to engrave the orchestra score. Can you get hold of the Leipzig Illustrierte Zeitung? The copy of the 12th of April contained a fine article on Lohengrin by Liszt.
My book Opera and Drama is to appear in about two months.
For the rest things are going along well enough: tomorrow I am to go as far as the Bodensee to meet a Dresden admirer who has saved the money to visit me: we are to return by way of the Appenzell Alps.
You have run out of ink again? God, I wouldn't really care whether I had ink or not! What we are now doing with ink is nothing more than onanism! If I were single—I wouldn't mind any privation: that might give me some incentive in my miserable state.
I long passionately for Revolution, and only the hope of living to see it and partaking in it is what gives me the courage to live.
Well, it's natural that Paris would be the starting place! Meanwhile we beguile ourselves as best we can into our real-life denial. It is always art that alone lends itself to this delusion.
On the whole you afford me a great deal of fun! With all your poverty and miserable existence you are always to me an amusing and jolly fellow: your troubles have something so enormously comic about them, even those caused by your friends, and under certain circumstances even a certain friend! Well, water yourself adequately, so that you'll be wet and fresh on your feet when the Devil himself is let loose. By the way, have a natural wig made by Lindemann, since he produces new intestines and, if I'm not mistaken, new hearts too!
By the way, I completely acknowledge the science of water cures. I am taking on a bit of water too—you may not believe that the object of life is absolute health, but the real question is: What does one do with that health? And at this point we recognize that if we were concerned with nothing but water cures, life itself would go to the devil. So it is not water which must cure us, but fire; if we go through fire we'll need no more water—except to refresh ourselves. We can effect now what cures we want by water, but as soon as we become involved in life at the moment, the old mess starts over again. But are you able to live outside our life as it unfortunately is now?
Enough for the present with that water-philosophy! I can write you only damned little from here—of course I lead a very retired life in my villa: the only alternative is the beer parlor. Herwegh now lives here and makes agreeable company. My wife is taking a cure now—drinking and bathing. By the way, she is well and actually very good-humored. She gives you cordial greetings. With "you" I especially include Anders too. Give him my best! Farewell, old fellow! Write much and soon to your
R. W.
Source: Letters of Richard Wagner: The Burrell Collection, ed. John N. Burk (Macmillan, 1950), No. 103