[...] In truth, I now find myself in a crisis which thus far has prevented me from rising far above myself. After a single stroke of good fortune, which brought me overnight fame & employment (something so necessary & important in Germany), my guardian angel has suddenly folded its wings; since I first appeared on the scene in Dresden, it has proved impossible to make any further advance. What I need is a large city, & indeed the largest in Germany, wherein to consolidate my success in Dresden: but Berlin seems to exist only in order to undermine that success. It was in itself a hazardous undertaking to appear before such a wide public with a work like my “flying Dutchman”, given the fact that the audience was not previously disposed in my favour: I really should have made my debut in Berlin with “Rienzi”. But no sooner had my Dutchman seen the light of day in a fairly effective fashion - albeit in the unmusical & unflattering confines of the Schauspielhaus - when the Berlin intendant took it into his head to undermine the impression I had succeeded in making by removing the opera from the repertoire, purely as a concession to slovenly routine. As a result, he has virtually wrecked whatever chances this work of mine may have had, & I may as well give up all hope of seeing it taken up elsewhere, at least for the time being. I am now working hard to see if a production of Rienzi might still be possible in Berlin. Meierbeer, who last summer attended the 20th performance of this opera, when he had a further opportunity to convince himself of the effectiveness of the piece, not least because the singers were called out in front of the curtain & greeted with tumultuous applause after each of the five acts, indeed, at the end of the 4th act the author himself was twice honoured in the same way, - Meierbeer promised to leave no stone unturned in his attempts to present this opera to the Berliners at the earliest available opportunity. I do not yet doubt the honesty of his intentions towards me, the difficulty which still remains to be solved & which makes a performance of my opera an impossibility is the lack of a Heldentenor - this on its own is sufficient to make me despair in general. - This problem of getting my works accepted elsewhere is doubly prejudicial to my cause thanks to the present state of music criticism in Dresden. Dresden is a place which had sunk into utter critical insignificance as a result of a century of slovenly routine: Weber discovered a flourishing Italian opera here, a rank & parasitical growth, - he first had to create a German opera & he had to do so under the most difficult conditions in the world, chief of which was the open hostility of the Court. The artistic standards which he was able to introduce remained fairly modest during his own lifetime, - he himself had his own works first performed elsewhere. Since Weber’s death, artistic standards have risen considerably, largely as a result of the dissolution of the Italian opera, but the spirit which informs the new administration has succumbed to the crassest philistinism causing the most irreparable damage to Weber’s incipient attempts to enhance the musical significance of Dresden. Encouraged by the high standards I found here, I have now set about the glorious task of carrying on Weber’s work, i.e. helping to emancipate Dresden musically, taking the philistines for a ride, educating public taste so that audiences learn to appreciate what is noble in art, & in that way making Weber’s voice heard. And what is the first obstacle I come up against? Envy!! As long as I was the poor musician whom nobody had heard of & whose opera brought him overnight success, all was well: but when this success was seen to be rewarded in the form of a life appointment at an annual salary of 1500 thr., the milk of human kindness curdled & turned sour. Fortunately, I have been able to counteract the hostile effects of this envy, at least where it stood in the way of my practical music-making; but it thrives in rank luxuriance in precisely that field which my honour prevents me from entering, namely the field of criticism. [...] I know of course that a newspaper report cannot turn a good work into a bad one or a bad one into a good one; - but newspapers can harm a good cause by impeding & delaying its progress, - they have a disheartening effect. In point of fact, I must admit that, for my own part, I have not been disheartened in spite of the evident problems in getting my operas accepted elsewhere, but I have begun to vacillate in my resolve - a resolve which might well have had some slight merit if only I were to have carried it out. It was in fact my intention, following the splendid success I had achieved in Dresden, to sever all links with Paris, in the splendid conviction that the time had come when a dramatic musician could influence Germany from within Germany itself. I still think it is extremely important for the whole future of dramatic music in Germany that a phenomenon which issues from the heart of Germany should spread throughout the country, & I confess that it is with a sense of great pain that I occasionally find myself glancing involuntarily in the direction of Paris in an attempt to escape from the mud which is thrown up at me by every step I take, & I say to myself: is Paris unique in its ability to influence Germany? When my thoughts turn to Paris in this way, I feel a sense of woeful disquiet, as though I were planning to betray my own mother! - It is a fine thing, is it not, for a man to be driven to such treasonable thoughts! - Help me to wipe them from my mind! I am enclosing with this letter a copy of my “Tannhäuser” as he lives & breathes, a German from head to toe; kindly accept it as a present. May he be capable of winning me the hearts of my fellow Germans in far greater numbers than my earlier works have thus far succeeded in doing! This work must be good, or I am incapable of ever achieving anything good. I felt that a very real spell had been cast upon me as I was writing it; it required the merest contact with the subject-matter & I immediately began to tremble with warmth & passion: - in spite of the long interruptions which kept me away from the score for months on end, I was always able to reimmerse myself in an instant in the characteristic aura of the work, an aura which had so exhilarated me when I first conceived the piece. - [...]
Following your advice I have retouched one or two lines in the text, including the “sable pinions” in Wolfram’s aria on p. 40; this has now been dropped. But I have left unaltered the final rhyme of “God” & “mock”, because what I see in this word “mock” has nothing to do with the constraints of rhyme, rather is it the most typical poetical word for the way in which an obdurate priesthood has perverted the meaning of divine mercy. So help me God!
At the end of this month I intend going to Marienbad in the hope of finding a cure for my unspeakable abdominal disorder, & in August I shall return to Dresden to rehearse “Tannhäuser”: the piano arrangements etc. are already finished, so that the day after the first performance I shall be completely free to do as I please. I plan to idle away the whole of the coming year, i.e. devouring the contents of my library without producing any work, although I regret to say that I do once again feel the urge to write something now that a new subject has caught my imagination; but I intend to resist that urge, by force if necessary, firstly because there are a number of new things I should like to learn about, & secondly because I have come to the conclusion that if a dramatic work is to possess concentrated significance & originality, it must be the result of a certain step upwards in an artist’s life & of a certain important period in his development: but such a step - such a period is not marked off by half-yearly intervals: it takes several years to produce such concentrated maturity. Only money-grubbers can be content to produce a single insignificant work - I shall never earn any money for myself, - I am now fully resigned to that fact. [...]
Source: Selected Letters of Richard Wagner, trans. and ed. Stewart Spencer and Barry Millington (W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), No. 68