Best of friends, I have been on the point of writing to you on a number of occasions, though I should have preferred any other moment to the present one; although I now have an hour free, I am on the whole so depressed, empty-headed, dull-witted & uninspired that I simply do not know how I might appear before you with the requisite poise & dignity. God has created music purely to spite me, and I find it a real tonic to turn now & again to reading; pounding out music gives me no satisfaction, and when I have to do it, as was the case last week, then it must be the Creator’s intentional aim to add to my sense of wretchedness. You know I like Bellini’s opera Romeo & Juliet, all right - but now I find myself working for an idiot of a manager who demands that I rehearse the opera in 5 days, since I once had the misfortune to express the view that it is a very easy work to put on. I have now achieved the impossible, and between last Monday and yesterday I managed to drum the opera into 2 of the most unmusical singers on the face of God’s earth, so that by yesterday we were even able to have an orchestral rehearsal; - but I’ve lost all sense of humour in the process, and my soul is awash in emptiness and idiocy, - in addition to which I’ve allowed all my love affairs to grow cold, I’ve been gambling and lost regularly, have no money into the bargain, and, above all, am caught up in the composition of a symphony about which I have already written to Pohlenz, and which I am completely incapable of finishing. [...]
the 15th Sept.
[...] I’ve had a fearful amount of work to do; - tomorrow we start all over again, this time on The Eagle’s Nest; - you’ll be here in time to see it. You should also get Fräulein Planer, - she has given me a couple of moments of sensual transfiguration, - it was marvellous. - I don’t really have a mistress at present, - I simply haven’t the time; - I’m still seeing something of Toni - but that’s all; - the only thing I feel passionately sentimental about at the moment is the fact that tomorrow is pay-day! [...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 8