[...] My dear friend, after you had left me, everything seemed dreary and lifeless: I felt totally shut off from the world around me - all the more powerfully did it live within me. My mother and sister had gone to stay in Vienna: - I was totally abandoned! My godlike music was bound to come, and you may believe me when I tell you that it was in this state that I wrote what is my most powerful work to date, a symphony which I completed within the space of 6 weeks. - It was finished, and now it was time for life around me to start up again. - I travelled to Vienna, spent four weeks there, and everything was fine. But then . . . ! - From Vienna I travelled to Pravonin, one of Count Pachta’s estates in Bohemia. There, within the glorious bosom of nature, I spent the next 5 weeks. Oh, what glorious days! For not only nature but (out with it!) love, too, ennobled me. But how? - Imagine in Jenny an ideal of beauty, and my burning imagination - and there you have it all. In her beauty my passion thought it could see everything that might raise her up to the status of a glorious apparition. My idealizing gaze descried in her all that it desired to behold, and that was my misfortune! - I thought that she returned my love; indeed, it required only a bold advance on my part, and she would have returned my feelings! But what kind of a response? - Some fearful apprehension held me in check; - and yet, what a struggle it cost me to overcome my violent passion. My dreams each night were troubled; - I repeatedly awoke, dreaming that I was confessing my love to her, and yet each time I was aware only of the night around me, suffocating me with a sense of grievous foreboding. - Then at last, - for it could not have continued much longer! - at last the truth was bound to dawn on me! - We travelled to Prague, ah and - you can well imagine the wounds that ardent love may leave behind; - but what such love can kill is more terrible than aught else! - Hear me then, and grant me your compassionate understanding: - she was not worthy of my love! -
A deathly chill once more took possession of my heart. Oh, had I only been able to renounce at once all beautiful hopes, had I grown numb with cold, I should have deemed myself happy indeed! - But to feel every spark of that once refulgent flame dying out by and by, to see every atom of a once burgeoning hope gradually disappear, to see hour by hour the halo of spiritual beauty fading from sight, ah! that wrings from me tears whose bitterness can only be felt but never expressed! - When I tried to warm myself by the dying embers of that love, I felt only death’s icy blast blowing over me; I stood there paralyzed, my eyes staring vacantly into a torrent of fire from the past, and the frozen wastes of the future! - Enough, - enough, I have already said too much! - For, despite the infinite void within my breast, I still feel within me a desire for love; - and what shocks me most of all is that I look so hale and healthy! -
It was in these circumstances that I drafted the poem of my opera and returned with it completed to Leipzig some 2 weeks ago.
3rd January
I have rescinded and destroyed the libretto. You’ll be hearing from me again soon. - Adieu, adieu!
Yours,
Richard Wagner.
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 5