You will no doubt be surprised at not yet having received a reply to your last two letters; - in fact I had already written to you with an enclosure for F. Mendelsohn-Bartholdy, and had ordered some oil-cloth so that you would be able to forward to him a whole load of my compositions; - I have already sealed the letter, so I shall give it to you when you get here. - I have completely changed my mind, & am not sending you anything since, for the time being, I am taking my definitive leave of the concert hall. I can certainly do without your suggestion that I should send some finely worked overture of mine to Leipzig; I have no wish to be a mere hanger-on; & your praise for Mendelsohn is the final discouragement. Farewell to unalloyed splendour, for I intend to abandon myself to the trumpery of the stage; from now on I shall be exclusively an opera composer, & am throwing myself body & soul - with all my hopes as well - into this opera of mine on which I am now busily working. - Practical music-making is now my chief pleasure in life, - in the short time I have been here it has brought me a considerable sense of reward. The opera company here is now completely my own work, & I have managed, as a result of skilful discernment, to draw a couple of young talented singers to public attention, who may well have something to say to the theatrical world in years to come. Who had previously given serious consideration to Minna’s sister, until then a quite insignificant member of the Brunswick ensemble? I engaged the girl on account of her beautiful contralto voice, & have gone through the part of Romeo with her; - rarely can a debutante have caused such a great sensation as she did; - people were beside themselves with enthusiasm; the opera had to be repeated immediately afterwards, & the house was once again packed to the rafters, & the noise was as deafening as that which normally greets Devrient; - I have also discovered a tenor by the name of Schreiber & am giving him a proper musical training, much to the satisfaction of our local audiences. It gives me a real sense of pleasure! And it is all my own work! - Let me tell you, I have also reason to be proud of my achievements as a conductor. The operas I have given are performed promptly & as written; we are rehearsing several new operas - Jessonda (completely new here!) - Norma, Lestocq; I’m determined that everything shall proceed smoothly. In addition, we’ve now put our affairs in proper order; - our wages are now paid on the dot; - everything’s fine, - fine! And I have unlimited control over the company, something which gives me a lot of satisfaction! Perhaps I shall achieve the same sort of high standards as Mendelsohn, - but I am only in Magdeburg, while he is in Leipzig, - that’s the difference. Well, this is the road I intend to take! - I feel strong & energetic enough to face what’s ahead! I’ll not worry about Leipzig, - I’m at present in the process of opening up a completely different line of approach, - Berlin, where I’m intending to have my Ban on Love first performed; - I’ll tell you more about this another time; - all I need say now is that I do not in the least hanker after you lot & the sort of fame you enjoy in Leipzig.
The 27th. I was interrupted yesterday. - It is odd: you, too, have suggested in your recent letters that we should aim at revising our modern ideas; modern attitudes towards love etc. no longer suit you, Theodor, & may perhaps never have suited you; my present middle-class attitude weighs somewhat heavily on me, I admit, & I might even be weak enough to give way once again to a number of obsolete ideas; but my unshakeable views on the present status of art continue to exert the most stimulating & powerful influence upon my middle-class outlook. The same is true of my music; - neither now nor in the future shall I ever pay lip-service to things German, & none of your classical Leipzig gloire is going to make me change my mind. We have stuffed our bellies full of too much unhealthy food. It seemed to me highly appropriate that I should concern myself once again with a work by a German composer; - I am at present rehearsing Jessonda, & how violently I shy away from every revisionist idea! The opera again fills me with a sense of utter revulsion; the effeminate Bellini is a veritable Hercules in comparison to this great, lengthy & pedantically sentimental Spohr; - I recently had the idea of writing an overture on Romeo & Juliet; I thought of a suitable plan, & would you believe it? - quite spontaneously I hit upon the same basic plan as Bellini’s dull & insipid overture, with its battleground of a crescendo. -
Fräulein Haas is very ill, - she is said to be pregnant, & will probably go the way of all flesh. - Don’t worry unduly about Minna, - I am leaving it all to fate. She loves me, & her love now means very much to me; - she is now the centre of my life, she gives me a sense of consistency & warmth; - I cannot renounce her. One thing I know for certain, my dear Theodor, is that you yourself have not yet discovered the sweetness of such a relationship; there is nothing vulgar, unworthy or enervating about it; our epicureanism is pure & strong; - none of your miserable affairs on the side; - we love each other & believe in each other, the rest we leave to fate; - that is something you have never experienced, but one can only live like that with an actress; - this disregard for middle-class values is something you can find only when the whole basis is one of imaginative freedom & poetic licence. [...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 15