My dear Friend,
I have quite recently heard as a fact that you and your companions in misfortune are allowed to receive letters, not only from your nearest relatives, but also from your friends, provided that those letters merely touch on personal interests, or at any rate on such matters as have no reference to politics. Now, as my desire was, in the first place, to express my deep and anxious solicitude as to your fate, and in the second place to inform you how things had befallen me, I resolved at once to write to you. But, first and foremost, I was anxious to know exactly how you were as regards health. It was, therefore, a great pleasure to me to hear from your private doctor that there was no truth in the rumour of your having, through impatience and insubordination, forfeited the favour of being allowed to occupy your time in literary work, and, further, that you were bearing up well under the circumstances, and that your vigour was undiminished. I admit that it is only since hearing this account of you that I feel able to write to you as I should like.
You will readily believe that ever since we parted I have anxiously striven to have news of you, and, as far as was possible, I have kept myself informed as to your fate. Soon after we last met, it chanced that your wife and I were in the same town; but owing to a peculiar combination of circumstances, it was quite impossible for me to call upon her. Soon after I heard that your brother Edward had offered her a home, and that he was taking care of her in a truly fraternal way. I wrote to him not long ago, and received no answer; but as I addressed my letter in a haphazard fashion to Bath, it is quite possible that it never reached him; consequently I should be very glad to have his right address. I hope you will be able to write to me very fully concerning yourself and your wife. I look forward with keen sympathy and with eager impatience — hoping for the best — to your letter, and in the meantime I feel that the best thing that I can do, knowing your interest in me and my affairs, is to tell you shortly how things have fared with me.
The external circumstances of my life are easily told. After our separation, or rather at the close of the disastrous events when we last met, I went first to Paris, but there I felt everything was at once repugnant to me; and though I was only remotely brought into contact with the artistic world, its whole conditions so repelled me that, after a very short stay, I left and went to Switzerland, and at Zurich I speedily found amongst the Swiss a circle of devoted, loyal, and sympathetic friends. This beautiful Alpine land at once revived me. I trust that you have sufficient fortitude not to be cast down by hearing this in your captivity. After I had lived down the painful impressions made on me by recent events, by the contrariness of present circumstances, and more especially by the fate of many of my friends, I felt my individual life quickened and restored to warmth and fulness by deliverance from the fetters and constraints of an impossible position. It is not necessary for me to tell you that I look on my release from the post of conductor of the Dresden opera as a providential piece of good fortune. With my whole nature, both as man and artist, in absolute opposition to my work and my position, the only hope of deliverance was in a complete severance of my bonds. From the moment of that severance I felt that I had an important part to play; I realised that I was the only artist who as such had grasped the movement of the times. On this subject — i.e. on Art and its relation to life — I spoke out my views publicly as an author. Of course I do not know if you were allowed to see my writings. The first publication was a short pamphlet, entitled Art and Revolution, in which I denied to everything that passes muster as Art in the present day the true quality of Art. In a small book that appeared shortly after, The Art-work of the Future, I demonstrated the impotence of modern Art, resulting from its disintegration into different branches, which constitute the sole artistic life of the present day. And to this I opposed the Art of the future, the only Art that is truly in touch with life and penetrated with vital force, and represented it in such a way that it stood out in sharp contrast to the merely academic, or merely fashionable, Art of the present day.
When I had completed this work, I had occasion, early in 1850, to return to Paris. During the interval Liszt had been working hard in my interests. He and my other friends were convinced that my one hope of a career lay in making my mark in the Paris Opera House. In spite of a sense of despair, I forced myself to yield the point to them. I sketched out a scenario, and started once more for Paris. The effort nearly cost me my life. My detestation of the artistic world of Paris, and the constraint that I had to put on myself, had such a powerful influence on me and affected me so strongly that it brought on complete nervous prostration, and from that prostration I only recovered by a tremendous effort of will — a sort of act of desperation — which constrained me to turn my back on all my friends and to seek refuge amongst utter strangers. At that very time — I was in Bordeaux — I learnt through a French newspaper that you and Bakunin had been condemned to death. I wrote you a letter, hoping that it would reach you in time to bid you both a last farewell. Soon after I discovered that the rumour had been a false one, and the letter which I had sent to Dresden to be forwarded to you was, naturally enough under the circumstances, detained. My intention to fly from my friends was frustrated by the great sympathy and affection evinced for me by a certain family. This household, composed almost entirely of women, lived some considerable time in Dresden, and is known to you, if I am not mistaken, through your brother. I owe more than I can say to them. But, first and foremost, let me mention Liszt; his love for me and his untiring devotion to my interests are almost incredible. Whatever in my nature remains incomprehensible to his mere logical reasoning, he succeeds in entering into by an ardent intuitive sympathy, the force of which is astounding. He has had my Lohengrin performed at Weimar, and in a manner that made it a real success — so much so, that they now speak of giving the opera at Dresden, but to this proposal I have made the most decided objections, and for many reasons. There is something to me ludicrous in the idea, which I hear maintained by many people, that it would be possible to bring about a reconciliation between my present self and the old condition of things. You see, my dear friend, how little one is understood, especially if one has the soul of an artist.
Lately I have once more given expression to my convictions as a man and as an artist-poet — in the first place, and at some length, on the subject of my own dramatic Art, in a book entitled Opera and Drama, and upon my own individual relations to Art in a Communication to my Friends, which will appear as the preface to an edition of my three poems, The Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin. The first-mentioned work will shortly be brought out by Weber; the second by Breitkopf and Härtel. How I wish that I might be allowed to send you these books. Härtel's firm are engraving the pianoforte score of Lohengrin, and — as you will be astonished to hear — they also mean to print the full score of the opera. From this you will see that public opinion has taken me into high favour as "artist"; but in the said Communication I have made it very clear that I care for no sympathy from those who distinguish between the "man" and the "artist," and I have pointed out the folly of making such a distinction. How unworthy — how, to put it frankly, absolutely contemptible — our "Art" of the present day is, has at last become apparent now that it has cast aside all sense of shame and openly acknowledges that its one concern is to be a paying business. You may imagine how unhappy a man of my stamp feels under such circumstances. With open eyes, I have to abandon myself to illusions, in order to find my justification for a creative activity, conscious all the time that my activity merely serves to deceive me as to the general rottenness of things.
To continue theorising would be repugnant to me, and Liszt has stimulated me to a new work of Art. I have done the poetic version of Young Siegfried, which I confess has been a source of great happiness to me. My hero, a child of Nature, has grown up in the forest under the care of a dwarf (Mime, the Nibelung) who has brought him up in the hope that he may become the slayer of the dragon — the guardian of the treasure. This treasure of the Nibelungs constitutes a very important element in the poem. Every sort of crime is connected with it. Siegfried is a being much like the youth in the fairy tale who goes out into the world that he may learn what fear is, which he quite fails to do, owing to his healthy natural instincts and his inability to see things otherwise than as they actually are. He slays the dragon, and kills his foster-father the dwarf, who for the sake of the treasure was secretly plotting to murder him. Siegfried, in whom the longing to escape from loneliness has awakened, is led by the voice of a bird — intelligible to him from the moment when he accidentally tasted the dragon's blood — to the fire-girt rock where Brünnhilde lies in a deep sleep. Siegfried penetrates the flames, kisses Brünnhilde, and the woman in her awakens to the raptures of love. I cannot enlarge farther on the subject now; possibly I may be allowed to send you the poem itself. Only one word more: in our ardent discussions together we have already touched on this subject — it is not possible for us to attain to all that we can be and should be, so long as the woman is unawakened. But why do I harp upon this string to you, my poor friend? Believe me, I too am sad that I can do nothing beyond harping and singing. I shall finish my Young Siegfried, but not for one moment shall I be deceived about it, or fail to see that it is a beautiful illusion and that reality is the one thing that matters. It often seems to me that our invisible bonds have a more constraining power than the actual fetters by which others are bound. And yet, this I know, and this comfort I can offer you — do not be vexed with me, for it is the one hope by which we can all encourage one another — let us strive to be and to keep healthy and natural, for therein lies everything — hope, comfort, confidence.
And now, my poor dear friend, I beg you, if you are allowed to write, to send me news of yourself, and as much in detail as possible; I shall always answer you, if permission to do so is granted, to the best of my powers, in the hope that my letters may cheer you and give you courage to endure with patience and fortitude. Farewell; and when you are feeling sad, think with affection of
Your faithful friend,
Richard Wagner.
Source: Richard Wagner's Letters to August Roeckel, trans. Eleanor C. Sellar, with an introductory essay by Houston Stewart Chamberlain (J. W. Arrowsmith, 1897), No. 1