My Theodor,
in a situation of which you yourself may have no conception, - & in which I regard myself, as it were, as having reached the very brink of utter ruin, it is the friend of my (alas!) lost youth to whom I turn anew, to a man who has himself been tried by the sorest of afflictions. To avoid all semblance of hypocrisy, I shall begin with the most egotistical part of my letter, a section which ought properly to have come at the end but with which I shall preface this letter of mine - the first for many years: it is this: - I am in the depths of misfortune, & you must help me! - These words will fill you with a sense of gloomy bitterness. But why, oh God, - why do I feel myself capable of braving that bitterness? - How could I fail to do so when what I have to tell you is this: - for a year now, I have been living with my wife without being able to earn a single groschen, without a single pfennig to call my own. Consider what this confession means, & you will understand what it is that makes me begin my first letter to you for years in the way I have chosen. -
More than 4 years have passed since we last saw each other: - during that time you have gone blind, & I must begin my first letter to you in this way: - there you have a stroke of destiny sufficient for the two of us! -
Scarcely had we begun to feel that we had the whole of our lives to live for when we learned how easily we could be trampled under foot; your own career was cut short by blindness, mine by endless want. When we parted company on that last occasion & I travelled northwards, - do you know what a gloomy presentiment flashed through my mind? It was the awareness that two people were shaking hands who would never again meet in similar circumstances. My light-heartedness had long been consumed by the financial misery that battened on my natural, sanguine resilience. My struggle was a difficult one, filled with bitter consequences, for I had to learn to renounce what I wanted, to fight against my very nature. None of my attempts to achieve a more lofty artistic goal met with any success; I had managed to have my opera accepted in Berlin; all it needed was for me to remain there for half a year in order to keep the weak and vacillating director, over whom I had, nevertheless, a certain personal influence, under constant surveillance & control; - but I was poor, no one wanted to support me. I gave it all up, just as I have subsequently given up so much else, & went to Königsberg, where a post had been secured for me. There I married; but indigence & hardship pursued me. I could not take up the post that had been promised me, & had to get by as best I could. - It was only then that I received news of you from someone who had recently seen you in Leipzig. From that moment onwards I knew what my foreboding had signified, though I had never believed it would meet with so cruel a fulfilment. - If ever we see each other again, you must ask my wife what sort of a person I became from that moment onwards! - How the poor woman has suffered in consequence! All cheerfulness, all freedom, all openness fled before me; I can describe my state in no better way than by telling you that this was a year in my life when I wrote scarcely a single note, conceived nothing & comprehended nothing. I was deeply unhappy! - At the end of this year of tribulation my situation improved, at least outwardly; I was appointed to a decent & honourable post as musical director in Riga. There I spent two comparatively peaceful years; I might even say that I began to recover there, were I not increasingly forced to realize that I was never intended to earn my living in such a fashion. I sought to dull my senses by dint of the most feverish activity; but I was physically incapable of leading a life to which the northern climate was so utterly unsuited. I fell seriously ill, a nervous fever which threatened to prostrate me completely. Scarcely had I begun to recover when news reached me that my supposed friend Dorn had taken advantage of my illness to deprive me of my post by the most perfidious of means! - It was terrible; but in my fevered state I sought to interpret the incident as an example of God’s will, & to see in it a sign that I should not stand still but continue to strive towards my higher aim in life. I scraped together a few hundred roubles, & explained to my wife that we were going to Paris. She agreed to coming, out of her love for me, although she has never harboured exalted hopes, & foresaw the misery that lay in store. We boarded a sailing ship & after a dreadful voyage lasting 4 whole weeks, in the course of which we were thrice brought close to death by the storms, we landed in London, from where we travelled to Boulogne. By then we were so short of money that I thought it well-nigh impossible we should be able to survive even a few weeks in Paris. It was at that point that a quirk of fate brought me face to face with Meyerbeer in Boulogne; I introduced myself & my compositions to him, & he became my friend & patron. For I knew that only through the patronage of a man such as Meyerbeer could my affairs in Paris be expedited; I took my courage in both hands & resolved to risk the journey here. What I have encountered here in Paris, oh, what a mixture of hopes & disappointments it has been! Meyerbeer has remained untiringly loyal to my interests, - but family commitments have unfortunately obliged him to spend most of his time abroad; & since only personal influence is of any account here, his absence could not fail but to have the most crippling effect upon my affairs. - What keeps me going is only fresh hope, but otherwise you can easily imagine that my situation with my wife & without a penny to my name - that this situation is bound to be the most terrible one in the world. More than once I have longed for death; at least I have grown utterly indifferent to it. -
I have thought of you constantly, Theodor, with a sense of dull melancholy. I never received any detailed news of you, & what I was told - was terrible! - Is it true that you no longer recognized your own friends?! - I was deprived of every means of consoling you; and what could I have done, utterly destitute as I was! You were a friend whom I grieved for, but who no longer belonged to me! - Then, very recently, I received circumstantial news concerning you from a woman from Leipzig, who was visiting Paris. What I heard shook me & moved me deeply, yet it also revived me & filled me with hope! I learned that your illness was purely physical in nature, & that there are excellent grounds for believing that you will recover completely. Oh, believe me, this was the only news capable of snatching me back from the abyss into which I had fallen! My informant added, by way of confirmation, that you had even published a volume of poems. You are still a poet! My poor, poor friend, - now you can sing, - you see, you have suffered the deepest anguish! Just for a moment let me drag myself out of the mire & explain to you that I, too, am still a poet, or perhaps it is only now that we have both become poets. - God, I feel at this very moment as though we were both sitting together again, gazing at some beautiful object, & that you could see once again! — And you can see to what extent I have lived in you, at one with you, - the work I have just completed is called: Rienzi, the last of the Tribunes! Who was it first thought of the idea? - I believe we have worked together on it! At all events, it is the best opera I have written. - Let me tell you, ( - you see, I’m beginning to prattle on again, as though nothing had happened! - ) - our Rienzi has turned into an opera in five acts. It was half-finished when I brought it here with me to Paris; in planning it, I intended the work for performance here. But I was soon forced to realize that it could take up to 2 to 3 years before I got such a large-scale work performed, since I first need to make a name for myself by means of shorter operas; & so, in order that my favourite work should not be lost to the world, I resolved to complete the piece in German & write it for a German theatre. I chose Dresden; it is more or less my home town, & I have already made all kinds of advance preparations, notably with Meyerbeer’s help, to ensure that the opera is accepted there. In addition, Dresden now has a large & worthy opera house, - Tichatschek & Devrient are well-suited to their parts; all this encourages me to hope that I shall succeed there. I shall be sending off the score in a month’s time; by the beginning of next year it may even have been performed, & I shall go there in person for the occasion. — You see, we are old friends once again; you would never have heard all this, if you had not published a volume of poems! -
You see, Theodor, these, as it were, are lightning flashes which now & again rend the night-sky all around me, but which cannot illumine the surrounding gloom, for God knows what hopes I have not already seen destroyed! I should almost prefer the certainty of death, but it seems one cannot die so quickly here. Paris is too rich, too rich in prospects & too varied for it not to be able to offer fresh hopes all the time. As a result I am once again engaged in fairly optimistic dealings with the Grand Opera for a 2- or 3-act opera, - “the flying Dutchman” - the draft of the scenario which I submitted has already met with the greatest approval. - What more could I hope for? -
For the present I should have liked to buy my poor wife some medicine! Will she survive this misery, & shall I be able to bear hers? - Lord God, help me! I no longer know how to help myself! - I have exhausted everything, everything, - every last resource of a starving man; wretch that I am, I have only now discovered what people are really like. Money - it is the curse that destroys whatever is noble; how many friends, who would otherwise have been willing to help, have grown coldly indifferent on hearing that word; my relatives turn to stone even before it has been spoken; - but merciful heavens, what is help without this most tangible of all its forms? Whoever knows true hardship must surely feel that it can be relieved by this means alone. In the past, when you made one sacrifice after another for me, I thought I already knew hardship well enough. I was a fool to regard such temporary embarrassment as hardship, I who have now learned what hardship really is. To have to use one’s wife’s last remaining trinket of jewelry, her last item of household use, in order to buy a crust of bread, & then to have to leave her without help, sick & suffering, because the proceeds from the wedding rings were insufficient for both bread and medicine, - how shall I describe this, if I have already spoken of hardship in the past! - In a word - God forgive me for it - I have cursed life itself; - could I have done worse than that? Scarcely have I regained a friend when I greet him with the words: - send me help as soon as possible; my life is in pawn, redeem it! This is how: I am writing to ask you for three hundred thalers, & assure you that, if you send me this sum, it will keep me going for over 8 months, as I know from the experience of the last 8 months, for I have not been able to afford anything but bread during the whole of that time. If you, too, turn your back on me, - I know what my fate will be then!
[...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 31